


Blood of the Dragon Tree

by CRScully



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1960's, Body Horror, Dark Humor, Death, Disease, Disillusionment, Folktales, Growing Up, Horror, Multi, Psychological Horror, Puberty, Suspense, mid-west, novel-length, religious
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:16:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CRScully/pseuds/CRScully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Told in two parts and set against the 60's Civil Rights era, this is the story of a boy dying of a terrible disease that consumes him from the inside out. During these last few months of his life, the events that transpire, the people he meets, and the grotesque yet strangely calming dreams he has convinces him that there are sinister forces working to control his fate. But to what end? How can a man live when every truth and every authority he believes in fails him? What will happen when he dares drink the blood of the dragon tree?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One, Pages 1-10

**Author's Note:**

> This is from a novel-length story, published ten pages at a time for feedback. I would say that it is dark, disturbing, and everything an author should rightfully disclaim against, but that would ruin all of the fun.

Prologue

           

When the Devil came to me, as he does at least once during the course of every mortal man’s short life, he did not, surprisingly, come as the slithering serpent of legend. He did not come as the dark seductress the church warned of, nor the drug peddler, nor the pedophile, nor the homosexual, nor the sinner in any shape or form that I might, even in my limited worldly experience, have recognized. He sought me out in the pure, Godly innocence of the wilderness—though they told me he would come like Sodom and Gomorrah in the heart of wicked civilization. Yes, wild, untamed civilization where temptation waits in every back alley and every black soul who changes money in the temple yard and fucks and eats and laughs at their own leisure, free from stipulation. Free from the judging eyes and eternally creased brow of an absent Father who cannot possibly understand. He came in the light of the most holy day of the week because he does not fear it as much as we would like to believe. He came to me not as everything they had ever prepared me for practically from infancy with baptism and then confirmation, but as a timid, gentle creature; one that man hunts and skins and eats with great fervor, sport, game. I can only imagine that this was not merely for simple trickery—for in my death-like state I was not very hard to deceive at all—but to impress upon me a most poignant realization about who I really was, who I was supposed to be, whose was the shell I had inhabited and masqueraded in in fallacy for the entirety of my short existence and whose skin I wore to blend into the treacherous, self-combusting forest of my life. Hiding in plain sight, yes, my true nature only discovered or rediscovered in the stern hearted, the vast, holy wilderness of true nature.

In effect, scary as fate is and if there really is such a thing as described in sacred texts, who and what I was destined to become. Destined, it soon became clear, from the times even before the one where I was born; an infinite, intricate, interlocking, labyrinthine pattern of seemingly willful chances and decisions that my ancestors in fact were not in control of at all. A terrifying and quite thrilling notion, a radical one even—that every single death was important and each action, however trivial, meaningful but not necessarily for the reasons the church ascribed to. I did not understand when they spoke in hushed, sympathetic tones of how my imminent undoing, my life scrubbed clean from this plane of existence, was all according to the plan of some cold, unknown, absentee Father who couldn’t have possibly understood. But when the Devil came to me in the dark dawn of that cold morning in the woods, when I had all but accepted and still yet unaccepted my death as a cog in the ritual machine that spun the world around, he illuminated in my mind the meaning that everything had been missing up until then. Suddenly, I understood and was glad.

And though the church does warn to keep a pureness of spirit and innocence of heart and mind, I can only reflect now and imagine that this was in fact the source of my great undoing. Like a lamb, I was so eager to follow and trust, believe. And I followed the rest of my herd and the dogs and the shepherd until the day they led me up onto the Imbolc alter with intent to cut open my fat belly and spill out my guts. And in my naivety, my utter trust of anything holy and ancient and ritualistic and meaningful, I would have let them quite willingly feed. But it was when they realized my sickly corpse was no good for feasting and that I was worth nothing to the good of humanity that they threw me to the wolves. Not a novel fate by the scores of souls lost to millennia, but one I thought I would be spared by the circumstances of my birth and my pureness of spirit and innocence of heart and mind.

But I am glad for it.

There was such a grand thing missing in it all, the chaos and horror of regular life; my great reason. I was ignoring that calling, but by no fault of my own. I was a prisoner of the pure, beautiful, privileged but purposeless life I had been forced to live from the day I was born. Born with no permission of my own, alive whether I had asked or not, all a part of the rigid, indifferent whims of another. All according to plan. There was no meaning. And without meaning, it was like I did not exist at all.

‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ So true to the human condition, so undiluted. Pretty words that I would have never known had I not met Avery. And still I wonder if that means that even his fate must have been laid out before him a hundred generations back, as mine, if it was always meant to be and then again to every single person I had ever known intimately or merely in passing. How deep did my conspiracy go?

This desperate ignorance and nativity was the beginning of the long journey that came to release me of my mortal bonds.

But I was glad for it in part because when I thought there was to be absolutely nothing salvageable from my short and inconsequential existence, the Devil came to me. As he does at least once during the course of every mortal man’s short and inconsequential existence. When he came to me in the pure innocence of the wilderness on the holiest of the weekly days, appearing as a timid, gentle creature that man makes savage sport of, it was to be my great undoing. It was to be the undoing of every wrong thing that had ever happened in my short, mortal, meaningless life. The undoing of the innocence of lambs and babes that had been instilled in my submissive nature since the first breath I ever took. The first chance to make right every last chance I had ever let slip away. So, in a sense, not my undoing, but my redoing. My remaking, my revival, my rebirth. When the Devil came to me at the time that I was at my sickest and had been told that I would surely die in half a year or less, when food had lost taste, life lost meaning, and feeling the same with feeling, His coming was quite possibly the worst thing that had ever or would ever happen to me. I saw it with open eyes for the very first time

And I was glad.

 

Part One: In the Beginning

When he awoke, as it so often was now for him and those like him who came before, it was not a true awakening. To truly awake, as it was in the days preluding when he first began to feel an unnatural presence in his mind and body and soul, would almost be a luxury. How easy one could miss the normalcy of alertness, being fully conscious and receptive, not bogged down with the sedatives and remedies the modern witchdoctors prescribed. The ones that made him almost as sick as his sickness did. The boy knew nothing of alchemists and apothecaries and even if those were similar such nouns, but he did know that the purpose of medicine was to make one better, not so much worse. Not so much worse that the looming, choking cloud that pressed down from the horizon line would be a welcome mercy when compared to the storm inside that crackled and flooded and filled him up to bursting in a way that was not holy and cleansing like rain. In a way quite depraved and filthy, actually—the obscene pharmaceutical pornography, so sexy and tempting, so empty and wanton, a quick fix to numb the pain, if the pun could be forgiven. Funny as it was, The Cure was little more than a title— the mask his disease wore to pretend and bide its time, a dalliance like distraction, an ephemeral elixir.

But his sister was an ‘angel headed hipster’ who lived for the counterculture and his mother had lived in a compound with a man who believed he was the second coming of Christ, so the boy was perhaps just a little biased, especially when the whole of his life had become one grand, elaborate jest and he found he suddenly had little patience for feeling forgiveness.

Distrust, disbelief, denial. Yes, all things they had told the boy he _would_ feel in the months turned weeks turned days, time oozing slowly like sap down the tree bark, encasing him, the fly, a blind, thoughtless hand brushing his wing, smothering, draining, drowning, everything tired and harder to function while his mind became trapped in this beleaguered body. Suspicion, suppression, superstition. Clinging to idols, cleaving to a kernel of hope that could be killed as easily as him. But he knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart and he never swore, never spoke blasphemy, never dishonored his parents, never stepped on cracks, never walked under ladders, always touched glass when he drove over railroad tracks. A lifetime of good luck and good love built up and tracked in tally marks, saved in ethereal notebooks. All of it made sticky and useless by the dripping blood down the flesh of the tree, the draining essence, the drowning torrent that ends the life of the tiny bugs that make their homes upon it so naively, time slow and inconsequential and yet wholly not enough at all. Survival of the fittest—that’s what it was all about. As true for trees as any other animals where smothering vines and forest fires felt concern.

This newfound pessimism was not like his person at all. But then, who was this boy, really? This mortal man? So young, not yet even offered the chances or afforded the opportunities that would mold him into an actual human, to become who he was destined to by nature and genetics and the will of God. Even he was beginning to lose recognition when he heard the voices in his mind, in the back of his consciousness, the only ones he had known and listened to since birth, become convoluted and hateful, faithless, crass. Beginning to deny that he was in fact the same person he had been born as, clinging to that lost identity, cleaving to a kernel of hope that he would wake up and be well again, wake up and it would have all been a violent fever dream, the fate of another man. Beginning to believe that he had crawled out of his cocoon and been transformed into something wretched and macabre. Because how could such a thing happen to him? One so meek, moral, virtuous? How could such a transformation possibly benefit him in the niche he had carved out in his life and his school and his church? If evolution were a true sort of notion (science being one of the only topics he found he did not like discussing with Avery), why would he molt, metamorphose, transfigure into _this_ and not some greater, faster, stronger being?

Bad things did not happen to good boys. Bad things did not happen to good boys and if they happened to, then it was all according to plan. This was the pill he had swallowed all of his life, the deity he had paid homage to. The principal taught in The Church to even the newest babes, the pedestal upon which they build their entire lives, the promise of a Father who gives and takes privileges seemingly at will to those who deserve. But in actuality, the boy was secretly beginning to believe even though he did not know the words to articulate it, that it and everything was with no discernable pattern at all. No reason, no finesse, no poetic justice, not the sort of writing that generates best sellers.

To put it plainly; unfair.

And yet, there he was. There everything was. The universe swirling in his mind’s eye, devouring itself, ending life as he knew it. A bad dream, a terrible nightmare, everything collapsing a million fold as it is consumed by a dying star—the kind of thing he loved to learn about in his astronomy class; the kind of thing he never imagined he’d see up close. But the boy who had been before, who had lived almost fifteen years now was gone. In his place was an all-consuming terror, a stranger, and though he could not pinpoint the origin as to find exactly when this change occurred, he was only certain of one thing; that he was being punished. That’s the only reason he could imagine that the universe, in its eternitous, terrible wisdom, would see fit to destroy him from the inside out like so much molten, formless mass.

Which is why this time when he awoke, as it so often was nowadays, it was not a true awakening and never would be again.

He groggily flitted back and forth between the living world and his dream self and the latter forcibly dominated, no matter how hard he fought. He rolled back and forth on the mattress, thick quilt pulled up high because of the creeping chill of fall in the North that penetrated his bones. But he was feverish, body inured to the cold and so the sweat matted dirty hair to scalp and cotton pajamas to sallow frame. He tried to get up, could tell from the painted colors on the wall shining through the gray saturation that the short day was almost done and he would feel worthless more if he had slept it all away, but he would after each try fall back on a wave of sleep as soon as it began to rise, overtaking him, drowning him, draining him, dreaming becoming like a luxuriant and opulent prison for his mind. He heard that once familiar family distantly watching the television, making dinner, talking, laughing, breaking, fighting, caterwauling and wanted quite desperately to join them even if it were just as a sentient shadow on the wall like in Peter Pan—the role he had taken on as of late. He didn’t want to grow up, go through every day, if it meant growing closer to the inevitable void that lay just past the gorgeous horizon, alluring. But the clock on the nightstand spent one hour after the other every time he opened drug clouded eyes until he had been dozing on and off for more than five.

It was very dark and he was very hungry.

But he dared not eat, every flavor having become saccharine and sickly, every bite fuel for the torrent flood that that threatened to break. The battle of eating, as it had become, was pyrrhic in nature but eventually doomed to fail.

In medieval times, he had read in one of Avery’s many historical tomes, they believed in such a thing as a demon or creature that would sneak into a man’s bed and sit on his body so that he could not move even after he’d left his dream world behind. Nowadays this is known to be a condition called sleep paralysis (according to Dr. Artz), but it was not so hard to imagine as he fought the valiant fight that would inevitably be lost that there was in fact some monster watching, always watching him, controlling him from the foot of the bed or the foot of the shadows. A sickening sense of paranoia, that some preternatural creature had ahold of the brain, trapped inside of this body as it hardened like amber, slowly, slowly, drip, dripped, and he was out again.

When he next awoke, it was in the realm of the mind and it was lush and deep like the vibrant, ancient forest. Alive. So good to live another day at all. In this state caught just between consciousness and the other, he was able to know that this was a dream, an illusion, but at the same time was so caught up on that wave that pinned him back down, that he could not awake. What a horrible fate that; to dream forever, lost on that tide but not lost to the void, carried far away from fear and pain and anything human. He imagined that must be how it is to die in one’s sleep, the soul never even realizing what has occurred and so it dreams and imagines and plays at being alive forever. He would have rather just been dead.

But this place he now found himself was so quiet, so still, so bright, and so very reverent that he feared for a brief moment that he had slipped the surly bonds of this earth prematurely. But oh, this place was not Heaven, he knew instinctively. Not Hellish by any means, but not so touched as to be a place where gods and angels roamed. He lay, in this dream, on a low stump of a monster, mastodonian tree that was so huge that thirty men could have sat side-by-side across its diameter and still not reached end to end. An archaic plant from the times very, very long ago when there were no human beings nor animals nor fish or birds. A sapling born shortly after this very world was, in the mere seconds after the gods from their Olympic perch had murmured, wistfully, “Let there be light,” And there was.

And it was good.

He touched the rings slowly, respectfully, each one signifying a year lost to millennia, as the stump itself was very long dead. Like most reveries, he could not actually feel with the same senses afforded to him in the human realm but he knew the textures and emotions because this dream now was one he was quite familiar with. It had come to him several times a year when he was younger and, as he had grown and with him the fate had grown closer like the smothering cloud on the horizon line, it too grew and became more frequent to where it now came almost every time he closed those eyes and sometimes occurred when he was not asleep at all. Though it had never meant anything as a child, and still was a notion only beginning to manifest itself, he was just starting to grasp at the silky, fleeting tendrils of importance that man attaches to things like dreams in order to make sense, to maintain control.

The boy was a human sacrifice. He had rejected the thought along with all of the others of distrust, disbelief, denial, believing that if he could trust no one else, he could put faith in The Church. He had a deep and profound trust of anything holy, ancient, ritualistic, meaningful—like any good, white, upper middle-class (well, maybe a bit more), Catholic boy—and besides that, the entire idea was so very dark ages and screamed paganism. But as the time began to wear on and the trips to the clinic, first the infusions he had known all of his life and then the painful treatments, the sickness, the loss of privacy, of appetite, of the thrill of what had been a budding sexuality, of everything he found comforting in the entire world began to wear on him, the thought wormed its way very deep inside the lobes of the brain and was impossible to shake. A human sacrifice, yes, why couldn’t he have seen it before? He had been warned since early youth and then more frequently as the horror approached, but each time he had turned away in blind naivety. But he was being primed for the ceremony, he saw that now, like the child sacrifices to the icy mountain gods of South America who were drugged and made drunken and joyous and fat with celebration beginning one year before they were led onto the mountain and left to die. The boy wondered if, in those moments of sobriety before they assumed the positions they were to freeze into for hundreds of years, the children who were not any older than himself thought of escape or self-preservation or if they just gave into the inevitable.

A human sacrifice! Like the virgins thrown into the volcanoes or the South American ice mummies or the Mayans with their flesh cleaved from their muscles or their still beating hearts cut from their chest cavities while their bodies were thrown down the temple stairs, as he had read and graphically seen in one of Avery’s historical tomes, he had been groomed all of his life to play The Role. To take center stage at his own execution, his body and everybody who knew him acting as the hangman, resigning him to this fate without his permission. Because surely there could be no other explanation for why his life had been cut through so soon before it even had time to flower.

And how he was told, over and over again like the chant of an Egyptian shaman that it was, “All according to God’s plan.” That surely the lord had a reason for cutting down the life of one so young, not yet begun to grow. And though it was meant to be comforting, to inspire peace, it was not and did not either.

“All according to God’s plan.”

He heard it so often that it had begun to lose all meaning as words do when said quickly and consecutively. He was not ignorant and he had always had a fairly inspired imagination, but he could not even begin to understand what sort of cog he could fit, what purpose he could serve. If his great undoing could possibly usher in a panacea to his and all of the problems that plagued humanity. And if his life were to be sacrificed without his permission, at the whim of a man always watching but whom he had never met, he could only hope that when the time came, he’d do it hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis waaaaaaaaaaaaay.

And so, as it had been in some form or another since he had first had this dream very long ago, the stump upon which he rested began to cry and sweat fat, slimy red-orange drops from every pore. They beaded up slow, mellifluous nectar from the core of the plant that oozed out and dripped down tantalizing slow. Except this was not as innocent as sweet tree sap, he knew. The sticky substance bled up and around his body, through his clothes and his skin, matted his hair to his scalp, ran over the cup of the edge and stained the meadow and precious little white and purple flowers red. It wasn’t always like this, in the manner the tree had chosen to die this time, but eventually there was always blood.

And he let it overtake him, frightening at first but easier as he began to relax and the copper tinted, copper scented substance soaked down into the microscopic knit of his sodden clothing and began to enter his body through his orifices; ears, nostrils, pupils. Down into his eyeballs, down into his brain. It burned and he blinked back tears, but still it weighed him down and poured in as if he were some empty mollusk’s shell to be filled. Like osmosis, it even seeped into the pores of his flesh. The boy couldn’t feel anything, but knew that this was to be his great undoing. And the blood splashed over as it became more aggressive, began to pump faster and angrier like what comes from a freshly severed limb and stickied the roots and low hanging limbs of the surrounding trees. They watched on, those ancient plants, horrified to silence, but too intrigued to look away.

“Phillip.”

            Soon the bloody brew began to bubble and rise up further until he was completely saturated, consumed, bathed, baptized. But if this was to be the end truly, he knew that with his last ounce of dignity that he’d do it hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis waaaaaaaaaaaay.

            He opened his mouth for the first time, the first real time in his life, and tasted something so rancid and acidic and yet so pure, the most pure and true and real thing there is. It rushed down his throat and chocked him and he gagged but could not even gasp or cough, did not need to breathe. It pooled in his belly and was so very hot and acidic, bubbling, bubbling, cooking his innards like stew in the pot. He felt as his insides began to gain mass and expand slowly, slowly, drip, drip and it sloshed around his empty torso until he was full and his abdomen bulged and distended. He would burst like a bloated bovine corpse in the sun if this sweet torture did not cease. He sunk down slowly, body turned mushy and putrid, decomposing, limbs separating from his trunk and also being dissolved. But it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt one bit and instead the young man felt wholly himself for the first time in a long time. Decaying, dying, disintegrating together like friends who had known one another since birth, and not in that lonely way that he thought would become his fate before, but in the beautiful, meaningful way that was a sacrifice—a martyrdom. All according to God’s plan.

“Phillip.”

Phillip opened his eyes and was slowly dying alone again.

Phillip opened his eyes and a crack of thunder like staccato gunshots ripped through his consciousness, truly tearing away any last tendrils that tied him to that other world. Phillip opened his eyes and there was a split second after he’d awakened where he was still not truly awake. In truth, he would never quite be again, only a specter that moved fluidly from one moment to the next but could not, for everything in the world, latch on.

A human sacrifice. Yes, that explained everything.

He broke out in coughs that left his already stripped, parched throat burning even more. His whole body was an aching mass of flesh and muscle pulling away from weary bone, tugging with every laborious beat of his heart. His delicate pulse—what everyone had always assumed would be his great undoing as people born with his condition rarely lived long and he had not been forecasted to last past middle age (but he had sure showed them!)—pounded in his temples and his eyeballs and in his groin where he desperately had to relieve himself, but wasn’t sure he had the energy for such an endeavor. The cold, restless monster in his gut shifted and growled with a gurgling, menacing warble.

“—I did it myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy waaaaaaaaaaaaay.” The tail end of one of his favorite songs, but it had been so long since he’d heard it. The last time had been a year-and-a-half ago while he sat with his school friend, Adam, in the boy’s mother’s car while she picked up her dry cleaning. The launderer had all of the doors and windows propped open on that warm summer day in their small town and the tune had wafted on a breeze from the radio in the store. It had been mere weeks before he was diagnosed. Even after, in those still simple, early times, those still naive and hopeful times, they prayed every night at dinner because _they knew_ it would help. It had to. He hardly remembered his companion that day (In fact, was his name really Adam or Al? Anthony?), but the scene itself was crystal clear in his brain because it was the last time, really and truly—throwaway memory that it was, so mundane, underwhelming, unextraordinary—that he was happy and joyous and had the patience for forgiveness. The radio played on the lowest volume and in the far back of his mind, wafting on a breeze come from somewhere long ago and far away in the house’s interior.

He turned his head to the side and vomited into the trash can on the floor. It was an inch full from the two other times he had wretched that day. The bile was streaked with veins of deep red and the rippled surface looked smooth as silk, not contaminated by food or anything else found in the stomach of his traitorous body as he could not even remember the last time he had eaten. This traitorous body, yes, not even playing at self-preservation—the most basic of animal instincts—but instead turned against him, devouring itself, incinerating itself, wrestling the will away from his own mind, gone rogue, conspiring. As if it knew something he didn’t, as if it were all part of an invisible scheme.

“Were you having a nightmare?” Rain pelted his bedroom windows and it sounded for all the world like the angry knock of an intruder desperate to force its way inside.

He blinked, grasping at the phantom tendrils of a dream he knew he had had many time before, but suddenly couldn’t remember.

“I can’t remember.”

There was a glass of water resting on the bedside table where his medicine slept at night. Tears of cool liquid welled up over the rim and made his dry tongue and cracked lips ache and pulse lustfully, but everything and more was just out of reach. The medicine he had consumed hours before was wearing off quickly, quickly, a little quicker each time he took it according to the doctor’s orders and his clouded mind was becoming just a bit sharper and less immune to the even sharper, pointed pain that cut like pieces of glass lodged inside his body. Some mornings he would wake up screaming from the utter discomfort of it all, the drugs long since flushed from his system in the night. Sometimes sobriety was as horrifying a thought as anything and all of the terrible things he had learned about Hell.

The curtains billowed and rippled and formed gently around the bulges of demons that hid underneath. His sister blew the smoke from her marijuana cigarette out his open bedroom window, cracked just enough so that the great flood outside did not come in. The stench was heady and made his sleep weighted eyes feel like bricks. He hated the stuff. She sat at the desk in the dark—a formless monster who became more clear as he stared—with the telephone that had been installed in case he had an emergency pressed to her ear. But it was obvious that this was not what she was using it for and he often felt indignant about allowing her the privacy to speak to her secret boyfriends—what she was undoubtedly doing now. It was, after all, his room. Or rather, had been in another lifetime. Now the alienation, the phantom rejection (like men who have limbs cut off and can still feel them squirming but the other way round) of his being from his own skin was quickly giving way to an equal hatred of the place he had lived his whole life, the place where he was supposed to draw comfort, to find inner peace, man. His sacred space had betrayed him, outed him to the wolves, could no longer protect against what he feared more than anything. But he was full of languor, had no energy to conjure up malevolence and so watched her bring the joint to her lips and breathe in.

Then out.

“I think I had a vision of my own death. It was…” Wonderful. Exhilarating. Transcendent. The culmination of a lifetime of seconds tick tick ticking down to the inevitable moment. “Weird.”

“We had beef manhattans for dinner tonight.” The young woman, only two years his senior, was and had always been loquacious and would try often nowadays to evocate a conversation, even if it were one-sided. Even if it were unwanted. “Corn on the cob, jello salad, banana pudding—” All in an effort to inspire his appetite, he knew. All because she loved him, he knew. All because she believed she was doing him good, he wanted to believe. And yet…

He gagged like he would be sick again and she fell silent.

She murmured something he couldn’t hear.

“Hmm?”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Oh.”

There was a heavy pause that pressed down on his eyelids and Phillip began to relax into a daze once more.

“You shouldn’t sleep so much, you know.”

“…”

“You’ll get your days and nights mixed up and then you won’t be able to sleep at all. That won’t help your condition any.”

“…”

“Phillip.”

“I don’t have that problem.”

“You know what I think?”

“…”

“…”

“What?” His sister’s sharp voice was the boat whose oars broke the serene surface of his mind with every word.

“I think you’ve totally entered a state of acedia. You’ve become…acetic. Acidic?”

The boy saw how his own thin frame had become sunken and cavernous, so off from the glowing boy with baby fat who had once lived in the same body. Bubbling, bubbling, chemicals in his stomach melting him from the inside out, a poison erosion, deflation, loss of formation in the places where pubescent muscles had been beginning to form. Not to mention the slow burning of bridges, the painful fire of ire, the fear and the stench of death on his breath that let fly every relationship ever collected. Gnats on a bloated animal carcass, baking in the sun, shooed away as he approached. Acidic, indeed, yes he was quite sure.

“Or maybe it’s a state of torpor.”

“I’m not an animal.”

“What?”

“Did you learn that word at school?”

“You know I stopped going to school like…months ago.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Two months ago but it was just a little bit.”

“What?”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“Who are you talking to?” He sat up, saw her head on for the first time.


	2. Part One, Pages 11-20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Disturbing Content

“Hold on.” She said to the phantom person on the other end of the line as she lowered the phone to her breast. “None of your business.” Her stare was pointed, angel hair glowing in the light from the streetlamp outside blocked my shadow streaks of rain and face painted with that same holy glow. What a drag. He lay back down, groaning, counting the miniscule bumps on the ceiling until the rippling pain in his guts died again. Laid to rest, but dead things in horror stories always come back with vengeance.

She took another hard pull of the joint stuck between two of her fingers and let the smoke billow from her lips like gray clouds that climbed back up to join the heavens.

“I’m back. No. No. I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. “I’m going to the doctor this weekend. I’d really like for you to be there…What? ...Then cancel it!”

Phillip could feel her watching his face as she spoke lowly, near whispering even when her tone swelled with anger, so as not to wake his mom and Daryl. He didn’t hear any more soft music, but then there probably had been none to begin with. Music in the air, voices in his mind, endless lines of adult professionals stretching to the horizon and speaking jargon—useless alien language.

“I don’t like you coming into my room when I’m sleeping.” She didn’t say anything so he continued, voice echoing in his own mind as he began to be pulled back down by the inescapable current, voice like an echo that rippled under the water. “Using that phone…watching me sleep…I don’t like it.”

“I don’t watch you sleep.”

“You literally just were.”

“I’m worried about you, friend. We all are. Mom thinks,” She hesitated, then he could tell she leaned forward from the way the material of her blue jeans scraped the chair and her long golden hair swept the desk. Scandalously, like the juiciest high school gossip, she whispered. “That you may try to kill yourself.”

Toby the Cat jumped up on the foot of the bed and the boy cracked his eyes. Even the stream of artificial yellow light that forced its way in through the closed blinds was like an ice pick in the lobes of his brain and a plume of bile again began to bloom and burn at his insides as sickly tingles traveled the length of his skull down his spine. He could vomit until there was nothing left and still heave dry, ghastly nonsense noises of pain into the trash bin or sink or commode.

“I haven’t even seen mom in days. What does she know?”

“That’s what I said, friend. I said. ‘Mom, if you want to know if he’s going to do something crazy, then ask him.’”

Toby the Cat settled atop Phillip’s feet over the covers in a way that could not have possibly been comfortable for the small creature; back contorted, legs straight up. Then he stared at the boy with slow, dim, permanently crossed, blinking eyes that dared him to move lest his toes and the quilt be shredded. No mercy, even for the dead man walking. Toby the Cat was an evil, terrible, despicable creature. He was soft and pure snow white and beautiful all around except for the parts of him that were black; ears, paws, tail, testicles. It’s honestly like he was born to be kissed and stroked and pet right in between his ears, but he would cruelly bite any person who tried.

When they had first gotten him when Phillip was very young—even before his sister had come to live with them from the far off world of Texas, sixteen hours by car—he had scratched the boy deeply in a vertical pattern straight across his face. All Little Phil had wanted was to hold the kitten with the cloudy gray, crossed eyes. Just give him a good squeeze. But his mother, at the time a secretary for a vet who had rescued him from the fate of euthanasia, had explained that the little white fur ball didn’t mean anything by it.

“He’s retarded.” She explained, tucking a stuffed penguin close to Toby the Cat’s face as he slept deeply on Phillip’s bed. “His ears never go back. You’ve noticed, right? That means he never feels threatened. He thinks everything is a big game. And that horrible twitch he gets when he gets really excited? The one he has to stop and lick and bite at? That means you can never touch him. He’ll usually just squirm away but sometimes he’ll get very mad and scratch and bite you even when you try to run. Ok, baby?” In his sleep, the little animal’s pink nose twitched. His paws had begun to knead into the belly of the doll almost three times his size, deeply gouging, penetrating, but in an innocent way, and then, like a babe at the teat, he began to suck on the long hair as if it were a nipple, vigorously, subconsciously.

“I think he was taken from his mother too soon.”

Excited, Little Phil had peered at the kitten, wanting to pet him now more than ever.

“Does he think Penny Penguin is his mommy?”

“Honestly, baby, I don’t think he thinks much about anything.” She touched his hair.

When Toby the Cat decided he liked Phillip’s bed and wanted to curl up there every night, the terrified toddler respectfully slept at his desk or on the couch in the living room for nearly a month.

Even now, having learned his lesson a hundred times over the years in a hundred painful scratches and bites (what could possibly be a death sentence with his condition), all Phillip wanted to do was hold the cat to his face and give him a good, hard squeeze.

He watched the small animal roll onto his belly in his half-dream state and fitfully begin to knead his paws deeply into the quilt. His mother used to say that when a cat did this, they were ‘making biscuits’, a funny sort of colloquialism to the days before pre-made. Phillip ghosted a cold, phantom palm down along the cat’s lower back and watched as the muscle hidden underneath the downy soft fur and flesh contracted and squirmed in a grotesque way. Like there was another creature altogether in between the layers. Immediately, Toby the Cat awoke and began to furiously lick at himself, growling at Phillip in warning, and the boy wondered what the point of having a pet you couldn’t pet was.

“Would you tell me?”

Startled, as the boy had almost forgotten his sister was in the room, he brought his eyes up from the feline.

“Hmm?”

She had hung up the phone. He didn’t know when. He often got lost in his own head these days as it became more difficult to navigate the planes between existences.

“If you were planning on killing yourself,” His sister’s voice was firm, almost cold. “Would you tell me?”

“No, of course not.”

“Phillip!” She stood, the fringe on the sleeves of her floral blouse brushing the wood top of the writing desk that had belonged to his maternal grandfather. Ironic, he thought, by the circumstances of the old man’s death. He was one of the few relatives he shared by blood with his half-sister and who had passed away not six months before.

He remembered that chilly May evening in detail. It was a week before his sister’s eighteenth birthday which was a week before his. It was a month after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and the riots broke out. It was the year 1968 and things were just beginning to be terrible for him. Not like they were now, but he sensed with the same instinct that an animal uses when it is near death to go and find a private place to expire that things were not quite as reasonable as his mother was leading him to believe. Those were the days when she was still talking to him anyways, and could still face him without being ashamed. The wretched pains in his stomach and guts and sharp pangs that twisted at his ribs and left him week at the knees would come for only a short period and then disappear for long stretches of time on end so that he could almost fool his mind into forgetting just how bad it smarted.

This had not been one of those times.

Everyone was there; Phillip, his mother, her mother, Daryl (his mother’s longtime boyfriend) and all five of Daryl’s sons—Billy (the eldest at seventeen), Tommy, Chucky and Randy the twins, and Sammy (who was just a bit younger than Phillip) rumored, or so everyone suspected, each from separate mothers as they looked more different from one another and were suspiciously close in age. There were also various aunts and uncles and cousins, second, third, fourth, more than twenty in all, but the boy had never been close with his family and so they were like strangers who touched him too familiarly. _Everyone_ was there, except for his sister, like usual. Everyone was sad. And if they weren’t, as the young man suspected, then they wore theatrically sad faces.

He felt like he would be explosively sick from every available orifice, but his mother had sternly warned not to leave because the unconscious eighty seven-year-old on the hospital bed with sallow skin and sunken eyes could, “—pass on at any moment, Phillip! Show some respect for Jesus Fucking Christ’s sake.”

He remembered how he had gripped young Sammy’s shoulder with a white knuckled intensity, knees buckling, cold skin breaking out in sweat, heart racing, feeling as though he would pass out if he let loose even a bit. And for his part, Sam did his best to comfort the young man by gently patting his hand and flashing him his best attempt at very sad eyes.

“Phil, I’m so, _so_ sorry about your grandpa.” The smaller boy mouthed and he looked genuinely so.

“Sam,” Phillip hissed lowly in the boy’s ear as the belly of a portly cousin jostled him into a bony aunt. The group of woodwork relatives were weeping softly in practiced unison and breathing all the good air and generally enjoying their own self-pity as they crowded the indifferent, indisposed man on the bed. “I’m about to be sick all over your shoes.”

“Ok, but only if you want to.”

It was that moment (probably not, but approximately) that his sister burst into the hospital room in a fashion that was uniquely, dramatically hers in all ways.

“Grampa!” She wore bellbottom blue jeans, rose tinted glasses, and flowers stuck into the knit of her hat and vest. She wreaked of reefer and was tailed by a very nervous, handsome, co-ed aged African American male similarly dressed who grasped her shoulder when she attempted to throw herself onto the dying man.

“Baby…” He said shyly, hesitantly. “Maybe I should boot. You need to be with your family, after all. I wouldn’t want to…impose.”

Her tears made the mascara stream down her cheeks and even then she wasn’t ugly. A beautiful angel even when she walked in the shadow of the Valley of Death. If Armageddon came tomorrow, and his mother believed the rapturous times were a hidden danger in every single tomorrow, and God could only spare one human the terrible fate of all man, there was no doubt in Phillip’s mind who would be saved. And he hated her.

“No, Calvin, I need you here with me.”

“Honey,” Their mother whispered. “Maybe he _should_ go.” For his family’s part, the arrival of a black man had silenced the pitied sobs and whines and appeals to Jesus and now the large group looked truly, uncomfortably remorseful for the first time.

“Grampa,” The young woman with the long, sunflower hair sat next to her grandfather and placed a cool hand on his wrinkled forehead, smoothing the soft white there. Here was the man who, with his wife, had raised her since she was a toddler and Phillip’s mother was a disillusioned teenager trying to learn to live without the religious extremists who had been her ‘Family’ for several years with him, in infant form, in tow as she eventually settled down hundreds of miles away. “Grampa, can you hear me? They told me that you called out to me in your sleep. I’m here, Grampa. I came all the way from Indianapolis.”

The sickly old man breathed just a little quicker, a little more consciously. His brow furrowed, he murmured something, tossed his head. The heart rate machine quickened.

“Grampa! Can you hear me? I’m here for you.” She clutched his limp hand to her chest.

That same ancient hand with sagging skin and all of the various marks of age then began to twitch in the fingers and the wrist until it gripped hers, albeit very weakly, in a way that was indeed sentient.

“Babydoll?” The old man’s eyes, still so weak and glassy and unseeing, cracked open the thinnest hair for the first time in days to everyone in the room’s mutual astonishment. “My Angel?”

“Yes, Grampa, it’s me!”

“Harrold…” Phillip’s grandmother clutched his mother and one of her sisters to her chest and stared on in wonder at what was surely the work of a benevolent deity in action. “It’s a miracle! Oh, Harrold…”

Those cataract carrying, old orbs which had seen the horrors of war and famine and everything evil that one may encounter in an average life began to focus more and truly see every face that crowded round his bedside. He sighed, a content wordless sound that might have meant everything and nothing at once—wholly appropriate for the last seconds of a man’s existence as it yielded a silent sort of grace that was not always afforded in life, and yet entirely un so if the indignities of the act of dying itself are considered.

An almost fond smile threatening at the corners of his wrinkled mouth, the tired, old eyes which had contentedly drifted from one familiar face to the next stopped when they finally settled on the lovely, glowing visage of his only granddaughter. Then they threatened to bulge out of his skull in a comedically cartoonish way when the old man saw the dark person standing behind his sweet angel, holding her hand. His face twisted in horror and the heart rate monitor ticked off a barrage of beeps that surely were faster than any heart could pump.

“Oh, God, no!” He wailed. Then he died.

There was a heavy, astonished silence that filled the two bed hospital room for several seconds as every person present gaped open mouthed at what had just occurred. It wasn’t until a cry of, “You killed him!” rang out from somewhere in the back that the truly earth shaking sobs commenced and the room erupted into chaos as several nurses tried to push their way through. Family members spilled out into the hall, fell onto the patient in the other bed—a mousy haired house wife in her 40’s who, thankfully, was in a very deep coma and would later recall a dream she had during her hospital stay where the aisles of a grocery store came to life and pummeled her with produce—a young interning doctor got punched into the IV drip, grandma almost went out the open window, Calvin the handsome African American co-ed slipped away, and, through it all, Phillip would have been busting a gut laughing if he wasn’t busy busting a gut all over Sam’s shoes who, to his credit, stood and took it like a true pal.

She wore the same blouse now as she sat by his side on the bed as she had that fateful day.

“Don’t touch me.”

She smoothed the wet hair back from his clammy forehead, face twisted in concern.

“We’re only concerned about you. You know how Uncle Ira hung himself in the basement stairway when he found out he had cancer. Disease like that—body _and_ mind—run in our family.”

“Uncle Ira wasn’t Uncle Ira towards the end. I’m still me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

A particularly brutal wave of pain that rose up and gripped his bowels in a stranglehold made him wince and lose his breath. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and let it fade. He gingerly gripped a low point on his abdomen that sunk abnormally, almost freakishly at the touch. A part of his innards that had quite recently been removed, the scar tissue throbbing fondly in memory of what had been. How horrifying. How extraordinarily macabre. How many dying parts could they remove from this fleshy, quickly hollowing organ sack before there was nothing left at all?

“Hey, I was thinking, friend…” She hesitated as if looking for the right words, watching his face for a reaction. “I know you’re in a lot of pain lately. I mean, I can’t even imagine—you know I’ve never been sick in my life. And I’m not really sure it’s cool or big sisterly of me or whatever, but if you ever—” She lowered her voice, lowered her eyes. “I heard that weed is good for the pain for people in that situation. So if you ever wanna smoke, come to _me_ and I’ll get you some. I’ve got this real groovy hookup back at State—”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“Come on, man,” She sighed and had to take another drag. “I’m just trying to help you out.”

The rain had long since died down into nothing and they had to talk especially soft now so as not to wake the parentals.

“Help yourself.” If the young man had been able to roll onto his side to get away from that hard stare, he would have. As it was, he pulled an unused pillow over his face and groaned. Toby the Cat stirred in his sleep and rubbed his soft face against the quilt. Phillip’s sister reached towards the foot of the bed where Penny Penguin had fallen and tucked her just under his whiskers. The fur on the stuffed animal’s belly had grown stiff and brown from years of attention and the cat began to purr deeply, knead, and nurse, never once opening those clouded gray, crossed eyes. Those strange, all-seeing eyes.

“…I wish I could…” Her voice was so abysmally sorrowful, so delicate, that it was taken by the blowing wind and old, haunted, creaking house almost as soon as she said it.

Phillip laid in complete darkness now, eyes closed, body pulsing each time the blood in his veins circled back around again to complete that age old cycle. He could have very easily slipped back into a fitful, dreamless sleep—given up his mind once more to that hazy cloud of indifference. But after a few moments of contemplation—

“Vut oo yu meen?” Came the muffled, exasperated question.

“Can you keep a really big secret?”

“…yesh.”

“You have to tell me one of your secrets first.”

He pulled the pillow off of his face and the chill of autumn in Indiana rushed in all at once and prickled the flesh there. The young man wouldn’t be surprised if the very hard rain had left a mushy, gray layer of premature snow in the ditches and gutters and rooftops of their dirty town. The children would be disappointed when they had to wear coats over their costumes come Halloween time in a month, but some things like seasons coming never change and to expect otherwise is the very definition of insanity.

Phillip fixed her with a lidded stare that she mirrored. His sister, his sibling, the one who looked like him most in the world—who had once bathed in the water of the same womb that created him and his tainted blood from nothingness—and yet whose visage appeared vastly, critically different in every conceivable way.

“What do you want to know?”

“Have you thought about killing yourself?”

“Lately?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.” She sucked in a breath that might have been a sigh, brought the joint up to her lips like she was about to take another hit, and then thought better of it. It was so unimposing now as it had shrunk significantly—such a precious little thing, less than a quarter of its original size which was small to begin with. She held it for a very long time afterwards until it burned down into ashes in her palm. The natural, gentle draft of the creaking, old home took them quickly, uniformly, as it was quite used to.

“Don’t look so surprised.”

“…”

“You have to swear you won’t tell anyone.”

“…”

His heart beat a single pump out of place and he grasped his chest, floundering at his admission. “Swear to me!”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to _say_ anything! Jesus.” A blasphemy, how uncouth. His seven-year-old self would have gasped. “I’ve thought about it, but I never would. Because what happens if I wake up in a week and the pain is suddenly gone? What if I’m better?” She said nothing to this. “Or what if they manage to help me at the clinic? What if—” He gulped, throat still very dry. “What if they can cut it all out of me?!” His heart began to race as the anger rose like any number of his body’s rotten humors in his stomach—bubbling, bubbling, acid stew.

“Phillip, shhh! Be quiet—”

“No!” He surprised even himself, struggling to sit up again and the motions building a seasickness, the contraction of abdominal muscles like a million tapered skewers stabbing in and twisting, twisting, bubbling, bubbling. “No, you stupid bitch, can’t you see? Are you all blind?! This is all according to God’s plan. That’s what everyone keeps telling me—all according to God’s plan and he wouldn’t let me die.” The last few words broke on a sob and he rubbed his face, his eyes, his hair hard with the balls of his hands. No tears came because there were none left inside and it _hurt_ more than when there was no vomit and he could only dry heave.

“Have a little damn faith, won’t you?” Toby the Cat, angry at being awoken, grabbed onto Phillip’s calves with his claws and began to attack forcefully, earnestly with his back feet. It didn’t hurt—the appendages long since numbed by the cold and the drugs—but in his anger, the boy didn’t actually care if he was being hurt or not and kicked the animal hard, sending him flying off the bed. The fluffy white thing recovered, though, and was up and out faster than even his distant, wild savannah ancestors could catch a meal.

“Phillip!” Horrified, the girl stood quickly, lost her balance from a combination of shock and the heady, fetid odor that still lingered in her mind, and fell into the table that housed atop it a collection of pills and syrupy potions, coming to land after knocking her head hard on the ground. A glass bottle shattered against the hardwood floor, letting ooze slowly a black, swampy sort-of concoction that, when it coated his tongue, made everything tasteless and numb and impotent, joyless. In addition, several bottles containing pills fell and shattered (the plastic ones merely popped their lids off) and little blue or pink or white circular, square, triangular capsules that could have been like innocent looking candy scattered and rolled into the black under the bed where the monstrous things slept. At least one fell into his bucket of vomit, little tablets sinking slowly into the darkness like poor souls lost to the ocean after a storm and shipwreck.

“Phillip?” The deep baritone of a man’s call from somewhere in the house, somewhere deep and far. “Phillip are you alright? What happened?” Daryl sounded more angry than concerned.

But all of what came before wasn’t even the worst part. Slowly, cautiously, treading like one does when they are fending off the approach of the bear, he picked up the tiny, soaked through book of poetry that had been resting just within arm’s reach of his bedside. The spilled glass of water, now forgotten, rolled off and, too, shattered right next to his sister’s bare feet. He held his breath, praying, but it was all for naught as the very old, very loved, thin yellow pages of the text disintegrated in his hands as he opened the book and became nothing, just like the ashes taken by the wind.

“Phillip!” The young woman on the floor groaned and then clutched her stomach, crying out. “Phillip, what have you done?”

“What have _you_ done?!” He snarled, throwing the useless binding of paper at the wall and then clutching his stomach, grunting, mirroring her actions as the pain in every sense became too much and he almost blacked out. His brain hurt, it was like something was bursting and then something really was bursting inside and he screamed.

“Phillip, Phillip, what have you done? You can’t even know what you’ve done…Oh, it _hurts!_ ”

The door burst open and the dark phantom of a man stood in the frame, backlit by the very fires of Hell. His skin was white and bloodless everywhere except for his familiar face which was bloated and purple and his bloodshot eyes bulged from his skull as big and round as golf balls. A noose was wrapped tightly around his throat and then hung down past his knees and swung with every step he took towards the bed. His head, neck long since broken, swung too from side to side in a horrifying way and snap, snap, _snapped_.

“Phillip!” The thing opened its mouth to wail and the stench of a million years in the underworld, a million rotted corpses, assaulted the boy’s nose. “Phillip, you need to take your medicine!”

“No!” He screamed, shielding his face with his hands as if that could protect from a messenger of Hell. “I don’t want to! Get away from me!”

When the creature got close to the bed, it did not even bother to step over his sister but instead tread across her golden, angelic head and crushed it. The skull cracked like a melon and the brains spilled out, bathing the millions of tiny pills on the floor who themselves had become sentient and begun to march around like wind-up toy soldiers, and that was all there was to it.

“Phillip, stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about! Look what you did to your sister!” When the creature screamed, it spat droplets of blood.

“Daryl, don’t hurt him!”

The creature opened its mouth again, preparing to bite his head from his shoulders in one satisfying _snap_.

“Where do you go?”

“…When?” Like talking in his sleep, he felt his mouth moving but heard the words as if they had to travel the length of the ocean.

“When you’re dreaming. When you leave the house. When your mother and her fiancé fight. Where do you go? Who do you talk to? What do you do?”

“…I can’t remember.”

“Phillip.” A woman’s voice coming from a place far away swam in the deepest part of his consciousness.

“…Yes?”

“Who _are_ you?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Phillip.”

Phillip opened his eyes and stretched his arms above his head, yawning and bowing his back upwards, breathing deeply and loudly still as one does when a heavy sleep is interrupted.

“You fell asleep.”


	3. Part One, Pages 21-30

He shook his head, palming his eyes. “I was visualizing everything you told me to; the beach, the water, the sand.” This was a bit of a lie. He desperately had to pass gas and it was affecting his ability to concentrate.

Her voice was firm, faint accent exaggerated when she was exasperated.

“We’ve discussed before; when I arrive for our sessions, you are to be well rested and ready to speak and listen.”

“I’m sorry.” He had never been sorry about anything in his entire life. He didn’t even know how.

“We’re going to visualize that happy place again. Remember, this is to be a place where you feel most at home. A safe place you can go when you are anxious or scared or angry.” The good doctor paused a moment, thinking maybe, but probably just trying to choose the words delicately. She settled on, “About anything.” And it spoke volumes.

“What happened last week wasn’t my fault.” He crossed his arms indignantly.

“You pushed your pregnant sister into a wall.”

“…I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

“And then you punched your stepfather when he tried to help you calm down.”

“…He isn’t married to my mother.”

The old German woman paused, smiling sadly, but it was forced. She tapped her pen against her notes.

“But you see why it is important for us to visualize a nice calming place when we are angry? When people make us upset, we have to remove ourselves from the situation, be as a silent observer—like an angel—or else it will get out of hand.”

Phillip said nothing but relaxed back into the threadbare, old couch in his father’s study. It was the same one he had to retire to when friends slept over or relatives visited and they took his room and it would usually leave his bones aching and sore. But luckily relatives had not visited for a very long time.

In his father’s lifetime, something so ancient and long ago that he often wondered if it was a truth at all or just a muddled notion pulled from naive childhood dreams, Phillip had always been afraid of the room and years had done little to diminish that feeling. It was dark—so very, very overcast with the heavy, baroque-patterned curtains drawn—and he hated the dark. The furniture included the massive writer’s desk where Dr. Artz sat and took her notes during their sessions (a relatively new aspect of Phillip’s life, but one he was not unfamiliar with), and the same deep oak made up a coffee table and bookshelf that each stood with clawed, Victorian feet, as if they were to be ridden into a battle royale de furnishings. A tall, ornately decorated golden lamp stood in the corner, an antique filing cabinet that had not been touched since the last time the man who owned it had been in the room was opposite, a blood red Persian rug from Iran protected the glossy, almost black wood of the study floor, and the plush, olive green reading chair that sat unoccupied by the window was the only inviting piece of furniture and indeed the only one that looked like it did not belong in a gothic castle.

The sun was up and shining bright, but one would not be able to tell from the long shadows that were being cast across the corners and angles and in the cracks to make them appear as gaping crevices leading to God-knows-where. Dr. Artz liked the room dark because it would be more “relaxing” for him when they did their hypnotherapy sessions.

She whistled to get his attention when he began to doze off again and he smiled, embarrassed.

“Would you like to try again?”

“Yes.”

As mentioned, her name was Dr. Artz which, although Phillip would never know this (and if he did learn, it would no doubt kindle more fuel for his torrid, existential crisis fire), in German translates to Dr. Doctor and she was, in fact, a doctor’s doctor—a therapist specializing in the abysmal, eternally burning, torrid, existential crisis fire that keeps many long time medical professionals up at night. When she was much younger and still living in Germany, she had actually achieved a double doctorate and so was referred to as (as is the German way) Dr. Dr. Doctor. It was around this time with young hearts blooming even in the coldest Nordsee winter that the still youthful and naive Dr. Dr. Artz fell in love with one of her patients—an attractive older man named Dr. Schlitz—and the two were married. She never took his name, however, which was curious to many who gossip about quiet but intimidating people because Dr. Dr. Artz was a woman who believed in, if nothing else, tradition, ritual, and the holiness found therein. Then, a few years later, while she was assisting at a prestigious Berlin university, she was awarded her third doctorate in a similar such field and would have forthright been known as Dr. Dr. Dr. Doctor in the tiny mountain village where she was born (and to the utmost prestige and happiness of her family) if the university in question had not been, as it was, used by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party for all of the maladies that made them famous (to the utmost shame and chagrin of her family).

But because she had become an ex-pat and was since a longtime citizen of the United States and because she had not been home to see her family and loved ones in the tiny mountain village where she was born since the war’s end many years passed now and because Phillip could hardly be pressed to care, she was simply Dr. Artz and, frankly, that was all she would ever be to him, though she meant well and seemed nice enough.

She had been his father’s therapist—who himself, Phillip had been told, wasn’t a doctor but a medical malpractice lawyer—and only as a favor to her husband (a gynecologist). And when his father was gone, as a favor to Phillip’s mother whom she had grown quite close to, Dr. Artz began to meet with him every Sunday morning after church and before Sunday brunch at the buffet. Suffice to say, at a very young age and having not eaten anything before the early afternoon hour (as was the ancient Sunday ritual) these sessions did not go very well and usually ended with a fussy, young Phillip being put in time out. Dr. Artz persisted for a few months as she had always wanted to work with adolescents, but eventually graduated Phillip to the next level of therapy (which was no therapy) and even awarded him a certificate of completion as if he had achieved some great task. What she was never quite able to understand—what had continuously been on her mind year-after-year as she watched Phillip grow into a handsome, if not quite sickly young man from glossy Christmas cards she received in the mail (addressed to herself and Mr. Dr. Artz even though there had never been such a person and long after her husband had passed) was whether the boy could not comprehend these tragic events of his life, denied them, or simply did not care. She could not yet tell which would be worse.

It was the same question she strove to answer as she looked upon him now—this skeletal frame with waxy, sweating flesh even on the coldest autumn day that labored with every breath. But to unring that bell, she had to first decide what her roll was in this comedy of errors; was she to help him find the hope and meaning in his life and therefore stave off death, as is true with anyone who has an important role to play? Or was her job to help understand and thus accept the imminent demise that fate had so cruelly written?

“Except this time…” She watched Phillip lay back on the couch gingerly, long legs stretched and crossed, relaxed, and close his shadow-rimmed eyes. There was a homemade candle burning on the coffee table whose label read ‘Christmas Time Cheer’ and smelled distinctly of pasta sauce. He crossed his hands casually at his belly and to any observer it might have appeared as if he were innocently resting them. But she saw how they gathered and bunched the fabric of his baggy sweater as he fought off his newfound habit of feeling and molesting the scarred, misshapen flesh there. “I want to use my own happy place.”

“Oh?” She blew steam from the teacup she had been nursing for the last half hour, only to find that it was nearly stone cold. “Where is this place?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’ve never been?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Only in my dreams.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Um…” He ran his fingers through the hair that, at the bottom of his ears now, was the longest it had ever been. She watched how he massaged his scalp—a tactic he had used, Dr. Artz had observed, even when he was a child to calm himself. “The good kind.”

“What do you dream about, Phillip?” She smiled knowingly. “Girls?”

“Hmm? Oh no, never that.”

“You never dream about girls?”

“Is that…is that bad?”

“No, no,” The old woman began to scribble a few notes on her pad. Phillip hated that. These days he felt like enough of a science experiment with the tests, examinations, experimental drugs that were to be ingested, injected, interjected into his body without the self-conscious, self-aware, self-dissection that came from wondering, always wondering, at what she was saying about him. “It means you’re a gentleman. Or perhaps you’re too much of a gentleman to tell me.” He laughed when she did, but truthfully did not understand the joke. “Tell me about this place in your dream.”

“Well…” The young man closed his eyes again, conjuring up the nebulous memory like one conjures a djinn from the realm of demons.

And instantly he was there.

“I had this one dream last night…”

That meadow in the forest with the little precious flowers and the strong, ancient, mighty trees with swooping branches was as familiar to him as any place he had ever been. It was almost like a memory, the nostalgia so pointed and gnawing, but he knew this was untrue. It was, as always, silent, windless, and more still than any natural place could be, as if holding its breath—as if on the precipice of something truly amazing occurring.

But this time, for the first time, it already had.

Because for the very first time since he had had this dream—so constant now that it was almost one of the only things in his life that was unchanging—what had before always, without failure or apology, been a massive, flat, regal but nonetheless dead stump protruding from the earth was instead a mighty plume of a tree that was more large and grand and elaborate than the contours of the corpse had even betrayed. The bark was a dull, sun-faded red that twisted and grew around itself in a spiral, branching off at the top into many layered limbs that stood nearly straight up and supported a cloud of green leaves. These leaves all had a red border and had looked sharp and armed, deadly to the touch (especially to Phillip who could not, like Sleeping Beauty from his sister’s old story books, even come near sharp things for fear that they’d prick and he’d bleed out)—not necessarily like a cloud.

“But I wasn’t afraid.”

“Why is that?”

“Because…I’m not sure, but I felt…compelled in a way that I never had before. I felt like it had…invited me to see it. Because you know in all the times I’ve gone to this place in my dreams,” Phillip said excitedly, tone low and becoming almost a whisper. “It had always felt…I dunno, _dead_ maybe. Like anything that was supposed to happen had already ended. But this time—this time was special. It felt like it was the beginning.”

“The beginning of what, Phillip?”

He chuckled almost silently and used the sleeve of his sweater to rub his running nose.

“I’m, uh, not too sure. But I’ve told you before, a lot of these dreams end in me…Becoming one with the trees.”

“Dying?”

He breathed out through his nose heavily, eyes still shut tight but restless. “In a way, I suppose. Not so much dying-as-as them using me to live. Like my body being fuel for the forest to continue to grow. Like a,” He struggled to find the words. “Like a sacrifice.

“But not this time?”

He smiled at the memory. “No. Not this time.”

“Tell me what happened next, Phillip.”

“In my dreams I’m always healthy again…”

Every time he had come to this place in his mind, it had been in the body the lord had given him at birth—the one he had possessed, controlled, maneuvered with a natural level of ease until just under a year prior. Avery had told him before when they were discussing literature and then politics (though he rarely participated, just listened, since Avery was so incredibly smart and knew the answer to everything) that everyone believed they were, ‘The antihero underdog of their own narrative.’ And thus felt entitled to or rewarded the things in their life. He had wondered before if this was why he was well in his mind when he thought of his future and thought of his dreams. Dr. Artz thought that it was only a projection of what he wanted subconsciously. He wasn’t sure. He had often wondered if, like in biblical times, he was being punished by some…sort of…unseen, absentee Father for the pride he had taken in his healthy body and the pleasure he had begun to realize he could bring himself, though he never mentioned this to Dr. Artz.

The notion, he realized, was a horrifying, cruel one, but he could not think of a single person he would wish it on and so it stayed in him.

But in the dream he had had the night before, everything was switched from the roles the young man had come to expect over the years and it had been as he was as he lay presently on the threadbare couch in his father’s dark, cold study; weak, unkempt, humiliated. The medication kept the very terrible pain at bay for now, but in his sleep he had felt everything bad that had ever happened return tenfold.

He wasn’t sure when the dream started. True for any dream, really, as they swirled, conflated, merged so gently and easily into the next as does the foaming, black tide along a sleepy coast at night. Perhaps dreams, in their own way, never ended but went on forever like a film reel in the back of his consciousness that he could only tune into when the time and circumstances were right. He only knew what his brain wanted him to know and so it was that he was suddenly there. He was suddenly there, but did not find himself until a few moments later and, when he did, his body was scorched by a kind of all-enveloping pain that he had never experienced before. In his real life, the tremors, sweats, fevers, the bubbling, bubbling acid, the stabbing, the hunger, the confusion, the throbbing, the burning, the vomiting, the sores, the bleeding, the headaches, the dryness were all localized and only tended to assault him a few at a time, waiting their turn. But when he fell into this world—so familiar yet different every time—everything bad that he had ever felt touched his broken body and mind all at once.

“—Hurt so, _so_ much. I couldn’t even think, even though it was a dream, y’know?” Finding his mouth very dry now, he reached for a bottle of darkly colored pop that rest on the coffee table and gulped like a man in a desert oasis. “Vbut—” Gulp.”—But it didn’t just hurt my body. I…I was so sad and _angry_ all at once.”

“Why were you angry?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Everyone is saying I do things I can’t remember doing. Saying things I don’t say. But I’m a _good_ boy.” Phillip sat up on the cushions erratically (even though they offered little reprieve for the muscles of his aching back) and cradled his reddening face. He liked to be able to sit like a normal man when he had conversations in the rare times he could because, after all he had been through, he still had dignity and found he needed to harness it and hold tight whenever it presented itself. Even if it played hell on his abused muscles and aching innards. “I can’t remember,” Everything was foggy from the medication. “Everything’s foggy from the medication.” Like a numbness that slowly crept up into the part of his mind that put the words together for sentences and muddled it. The pain was diminished, yes, but the boy was never absolutely there, awake, human. “—but I was so sad and it _hurt my heart_. I—” His voice was lost in a sob.

“Phillip, go to your happy place.”

“My…” Yes, that’s it. “Yes, that’s what I did. I was at the edge of the meadow.”

He was at the edge of the meadow. Phillip recalled how the dead silence and air of inevitability, the feeling of the entire world being on edge and eeriness of being the only breathing entity that had played such a starring, jarring role before was gone and now the trees swayed with life and sang the silent, joyous, sempiternal song of a world made new and full of possibility.

“I…crawled because I couldn’t walk. The pain was just so much, I—” He winced. “It felt even worse than when I wake up after surgery. Right when all of the drugs have worn off.”

“Hmm, residual somatosensory memory manifesting itself subconsciously—” The pencil scribble, scribble, scratched minutely against the grain of the paper as she took notes.

“And my legs, my legs…my legs _wouldn’t move_.” He whispered, horror rising, rising like bile, bile rising like the cold terror that gripped his chest. “And I was crawling on my belly, using my hands to grip the grass and it kept _ripping_ , I kept hearing the worst _tearing_ sound and I was dragging myself towards the tree in the center. And the pain was like nothing I’d ever felt before—”

Scribble-scratch-scribble-scratch, a thin strip of wood around the dulled lead point catching along the grain of the paper, a soft yet heinous rustle. “Mmmhmm, what then, Phillip?”

“And then,” His voice quavered, eyes shut tight as he grasped his abdomen through his thick, fall sweater, remembering what then. “Then I looked back along my body and I s-saw that,” Dr. Artz removed her glasses and stared at him intently with tired, pinched hazel eyes. She was a petite woman but round in the cheeks and tummy, as comes for most with age. Phillip had never met another therapist or another German but had decided long ago that she looked distinctly how he imagined both of these types of person looking. “—that some sharp rocks along the ground had ripped open a huge gash in my bare stomach b-because I was naked,” He blushed even at this admission, deciding, though it was no decision at all really, not to discuss the dream he had had the night before that. “And…” His voice faded into a soft whimper, red blotched, still vaguely, grimly handsome face covered in a thin sheen of sweat despite the chills going up his spine. “I looked and there was nothing inside.”

Dr. Artz put her glasses back on and took more notes.

“You’re afraid of losing power, losing control.” She murmured more to her pad of paper than him. “You want to be saved, but first you must give yourself up to a higher power.” She looked straight into his face. “You have to relinquish the control you are struggling for and give yourself to God; know that whatever happens, it is all by his will.”

“I—” He—

“But I still don’t understand when you talk about this is a happy place, this sounds quite horrifying to me—like a horror forest, I certainly wouldn’t make it _my_ happy place. Why do you say that?”

He told her why and she grimaced.

“Oh, my boy,” She sighed. “I’m sure even _you_ must know of all of the _Freudian_ implications of a dream like that.”

He told her he didn’t (Roydian?).

“Is it unusual for you to dream of…” Vaginas. “Blood?”

He told her that he always had. What he did not tell her, begrudgingly, was how this elixir was not true blood but another life giving fluid that he could not describe.

“Do you think it’s because of your condition? Your hemophilia?”

Puzzled, he told her he did not believe so.

She thought a moment, wondering at what his juvenile angle might be. But, finding his face free of any trickery (and, of course, knowing him to have always been quite a well-mannered, well-wishing… _plain_ sort of boy), said simply, “I think perhaps you are wanting to be more connected to your mother again.”

He waited a moment and when she said no more, “And…is that it? That’s all it means?”

“What do you think it means?”

“That…I dunno. That I’m a part of some great, big thing for…for practically the first time in my life. That I’m—” Being summoned, called, beckoned by some other, omnipotent entity to an assemblage that could change the course of his life. That the void that lay on the other side of existence suddenly made sense, but not in the way he had been taught.

‘—in denial.’ Dr. Artz scratch scribbled onto her notes. They had gone over the stages of grief before, but it had always been quite hard, in her experience, for Phillip to understand his own feelings. Anger, of course, was a very natural part of the process for one coming to accept their own eminent undoing. However, this had caused quite the disruption for the family as of late and, since his mother was the one who paid her, the good doctor had no choice but to try to quash it and hope that he was able to find peace.

“…Being drawn to this place.”

“That you are important. That your life has meaning.”

“Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

“Being drawn by whom? Or what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Like a premonition?”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“I think now I would like to try the hypnosis again.” She gave him a wry, old smile. “And this time, don’t fall asleep.”

The woman had Phillip lay back gingerly again, face pained but not overwhelmingly so, eyes drifting shut but not tightly, and long legs stretched so that the fine, expensive slacks that had once been masterfully tailored now hung loose on his gaunt frame. Even when his father was around and they were able to live lavishly, Phillip and his family found solace from their riches in the church and were taught to be humble at all costs (all costs usually going to the institution itself). And whenever he did indulge, such as dreaming about the car that he’d buy when he learned how to drive, he made sure to take his penance and say especially bad things about himself like how he was not worthy of God’s love and was a heinous sinner come Sunday.

But perhaps it was all for the best, anyways. Since the three major factories (Pfizer Chemical, Allis-Chalmers, and Anaconda Aluminum) in the county had shut down, releasing nearly half a million workers from their jobs, theirs had become a poor, working man’s town full of miners, mechanics, machine operators, maintenance workers, and marriage counselors and the leading cause of death for said marriage-aged males was either murder or overdose from a plethora of substances, the leading being methamphetamines. The city had lovely parts, no doubt, as even the worst ones on Earth do, but the abundance of naught but poverty was enough to bring this ‘highland’ down quite low indeed. Several major railroads crisscrossed all over the town and a man couldn’t drive anywhere without being stopped at least once by a train (it was a venial excuse for any situation that employers to educational professionals throughout begrudgingly accepted) and so, Phillip realized, it didn’t matter how nice the car was if they all got railroaded the same.

Toby the Cat was meowing pitifully and sliding his white paws under the door, indignant about any closed door he encountered.

“Listen to my voice.” He listened. “You’re becoming very relaxed now, Phillip. Your body is heavy, your mind is clear, you are focusing solely on the sound of my—shhh, kitty, go away!—on the sound of my voice.”

Phillip’s body acquiesced control as easily as relinquishing choice of the radio station or what film to see. It was like, truly, he had been trained his entire life to obey and serve his elders, his greaters, his God, and so it was natural, subconscious instinct on the subatomic level. His own thoughts became desultory and melted away into blackness.

“Feel your body in its space.” He felt his body and, the more he concentrated, the more the ache in his temples and stomach began to effluence, flow out and become a furtive, fetid, liquid sort of hurt. “As I speak, any tightness or tension will leave the joints of your person. Feel your head, your shoulders, your spine,” No, oh, God, the burning, oh, no. “Feel your hands, your hips, your thighs, your calves, and your feet all relaxing one at a time, the tension melting away to the sound of my voice.” The deeper he sunk, the more he realized he wanted to scream but did not possess the energy to even open his mouth, that cavity burning too and filled with sores from repeated exposure to the gossamer, caustic juices that seeped up from below. “You feel yourself floating in a space very far from here. A place with no gravity, but that is entirely grounded, like floating in…amniotic fluid. You are in a complete state of relaxation. The tension has left every joint.” He heard her shuffling at the desk, but it was very far—as if the room had grown quite massive in size or, much more likely, he had grown quite small.

But the pain was there and was now quite pointed and constant, shirking its host-inflicted abeyance as he was pulled deeper into his own mind and Dr. Artz’s words.

“I’m going to count down from five and when I get to one, you will be in the place where you feel most safe in the world.” Her words were soft like velvet and they fuzzed the areas around his psyche where conscious met sub—where that sempiternal film reel looped around his frontal lobe and projected dreams on the back of his skull. Or was that not why eyeballs rolled inwards during sleep?

“Five. You are at the edge of the meadow.”

He was at the edge of the meadow, more familiar to him than his own home, than his own family, or his own name. ‘What’s in a name?’ (though, Hamlet was Avery’s favorite play), and in this space he was nameless.

“Four. You are coming closer to the tree” The Dr. was saying things to this effect, but the boy paid these other descriptive words no mind as he neared the enormous tree in its hideous splendor and glory, for it was, indeed, hideous as it twisted and gnarled its own flesh but was entirely perfect because.

“Three.” It was as he stood several yards back that the massive plant began to change. That seamless flesh—labyrinthine in pattern, endlessly repeating—that had formed almost an imbrication appearing of many hundreds of trees melded together, began to untie like a knot and unmeld and unlace as if it were a riddle or puzzle that needed solving. And maybe it was, because what answers had he, really? Only a feeling, only animal instinct, and he was told his judgment as of late had become muddled, to say the least, and miscalculated.

“Two.” The movements of the twisted segments of ancient tree, almost serpentine in their suggestive slithering, had created a small alcove at the base where the bark formed a nest that was very narrow and then tapered to a human-sized width and then tapered again into the endless knots of roots at the earth. The opening was just tall enough to accommodate Phillip if he ducked and it was obvious what the tree wanted because it was what he desired as well.

“One.” Inside of the hulking giant was dark and warm, so warm, and wet with the same red sap he had tasted and encountered and that had consumed him many, many times. It was disgusting and bitter but was to him as the sweetest nectar. A healing nectar. For, as the passageway closed behind him, carving his claustrophobic fate, the insides of the beast itself pressed down on him from all angles and molded around his body, his head, his shoulders, along his spine, his hands, his hips, his calves, his feet and held so tight that he need not stand but was floating, like, in a pool of that slimy, red sap. And there was no pain. For what felt like the first time in a lifetime, there was no hurt of any kind. Only a sense of belonging and safety and, dare he even think it, but affection.

It was very filthy and Dr. Artz felt as if she were molesting the child just by saying the descriptive words.

“Phillip, can you hear me?”


	4. Part One, Pgs 31-40

A voice from the air rang out through the inner bark of the tree and traveled a great long ways to get to his ears.

“…Yes.” His words were as a low grumbling like when a man talk’s in his sleep.

“Are you in your happy place?”

“…”

“Phillip?”

“…Yes.”

“I’m going to begin asking you questions now. I want you to stay in this place you have created, Phillip, no matter how upset the questions make you. Alright?”

“…Yes, I’ll stay here.” For the rest of his life, he’d stay. It was the most safe and imbued he had ever felt, a frisson of excitement in the sort of bland unimportance that was his small life.

It was completely dark in this place and the crimson, efflorescent, fragrant blood drip dripped into his hair and his face and seeped down into his naked flesh. He relaxed, truly, for the first time and sighed and the sound met his own ears from the outside world as if beating through the veins of the thing itself.

And they began.

“How have you been since the last time we met, Phillip?”

“…Not too good.”

“Why do you say that?”

“…I’m not sure.”

“You’ve been angrier.”

“Have I?”

“Your family tells me. You’ve had frequent mood swings lately, been very brooding, sleep all day…” It sounded as if she were reading off of a list. “Why do you feel this way? Why have you been doing these things?”

“I…I dunno. I can’t remember. I just…everything makes me angry lately. I feel almost restless or…twitchy and I just want to scream. I hear them talking about me and they don’t know _anything_. They don’t even try to understand. I just want…”

“What do you want, Phillip?”

“I don’t know how to describe it.”

“Have you thought about killing yourself?”

“…Lately?”

“Yes.”

“…No.”

“Why not?”

He bit back a secret, angry laugh. “… _Why do you people want me to_?”

“I don’t. Quite the opposite, actually. I don’t want you to want to.”

“…Oh.”

“Your mother says you want to.”

“…That was a secret.”

“You shouldn’t keep secrets like that. You should always tell your parents when you have thoughts that could potentially harm you. Or others.” She added.

“…She’s only worried because her brother killed himself here…eleven years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you know your uncle?”

“…No. Not really. I don’t remember him a bunch…but sometimes he comes to me…”

“In nightmares?”

“No, in my room.”

She paused for only a fraction of a second to write a note.

“I never knew him very well, but I saw him after he died. I was the one to find him there…hanging…”

“Phillip that must have been very traumatic for you.”

“…my dad disappeared not long after…at least, that’s what they tell me. I don’t remember him much either…aaaand then I met you…”

“You know the medication you take is prone to causing hallucinations, right, Phillip? That that’s one of the side effects?”

“…Yes.”

“And you know your uncle is dead, right?”

“Of course.”

She wrote a note.

“His ghost comes to me.”

There was a rustling noise that came as she looked up.

“Really?”

“Yes…our house is haunted…”

“…”

“My school is haunted, the railroad tracks are haunted, the house next door, the one down the street, the Terre Haute museum, covered bridges, our car…This whole damn state is haunted…”

“You didn’t curse like this when we first started meeting a few months ago.”

“Heh, I remember when I first met you…When my dad disappeared.”

“Yes.”

“Well, dying does that to you, I guess.”

“You believe you are dying?”

“…”

“…”

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“Are you depressed?”

“…I’m not sure.”

“I think you are.”

“…Oh. Then I guess I am.”

“You have plenty to be grateful for; your nice home, nice family, nice school. You love your family, right, Phillip?”

“…I’m not sure.”

“Of course you do.”

“I love Avery.”

“The tutor from your school?”

“…Yeah.”

“The British one?”

“…Is he?”

“You’ve only known him for…less than a few months. I’m not sure you can really know if you _love_ someone—”

“He teaches me things…about the world…things no one in this town even knooooows about…” He dragged the latter part out in a contented yawn. From every side in his mind’s eye, the darkness and soft spongy warmth pressed in on him in a vice tight, but infinitely safe embrace.

“Don’t fall asleep, Phillip.”

“Noooooo promises.” He stretched in the real world and giggled. Then froze.

“What kinds of things does he teach you?”

“…” The boy lay unresponsive on the couch.

“Phillip? Did you fall asleep?”

“…About…the things that matter…” But he sounded less sure of what he was saying or who he was talking to.

“God. Family.”

“…No, none of that stuff…” Then he mumbled something that she couldn’t make out.

“What was that, Phillip?”

“Art mostly…history…poetry. The Uncertainty Principal…He says that—”

“How are your bible studies going with Father Abaddon?”

“—that when religion and science fail you, all you can turn to is humanity—“

“Autumn here is so lovely, don’t you think?” He paused a long time again before he answered and this time she knew she had heard him distinctly mumbling under his breath, as if he were talking to someone unseen. “Phillip, is there someone else there with you?”

“…I hate it.”

“Why is that, Phillip?”

He sighed long and deep, searching for an answer in this clouded, floating, barely there, barely anywhere state.

“…It feels like…the world is coming to an end…”

“Because the days are getting shorter?”

“…Yes…the darkness is creeping in…everything is dying…I’ve always hated fall…winter…It feels like it’s counting down to something bad…”

“What do you mean?”

“…Like the end of the world…at least for me…”

“That’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder. A lot of people experience it towards the end of the year. It’s perfectly normal.”

“…It is?”

“Yes.”

“…Then why does it feel so…” He paused for a moment to find the right words…and his train of thought derailed at a soft snore.

“Phillip, wake up.”

“…I am…”

“Without death, there can be no rebirth. Without winter, no spring.”

“…I love spring.”

“Exactly!” The good doctor smiled, sensing a breakthrough. “So it’s a good thing—a very happy thing. There can be no life without death. It’s like the waxing and waning of our moon; so must the planet binge and purge so that it can keep living.”

“Like a sacrifice.” Oh God.

“Yes!”

Bubbling, bubbling, in his body, in his mind. Bubbling in his head where chunks of his brain were being stewed with potatoes and onions like a proper Irish feast, slow and languid.

“Who are you?” Phillip’s voice formed words lowly around a short-lived sigh.

“I’m Dr. Artz, Phillip, you know that.”

“No, I…” He frowned and it was a deep crease that twisted the once serene, corpse-like features. “I know Dr. Artz. I’ve never met…never met you…” He paused as if listening to a response and the good Dr. watched, fascinated. He took in a sharp breath. “Yes. Yes, I knew it had to be you.”

“Who is it, Phillip? Who do you see?”

“I don’t… I don’t know his name. What?” The boy twisted and his hands grabbed onto his sweater. “He says it’s all going to be alright.”

“Yes, my boy, that’s good.” She beamed.

“…He says that everything is as it should be…I-I shouldn’t worry, it’s all—” He coughed and sputtered, twisting in his seat, brows still furrowed, voice still far away. “…All according to plan.”

“Is it God, Phillip? Do you see God?”

“He’s white light! He’s—” He was gasping for breath now, words growing louder and more sure as if he were no longer in a trance-like state but not quite in the realm of the living. “He’s large and everything he touches is bright. He’s—It’s—Like a stag—”

“Phillip, I’m going to count back from five again. When I get to one, you’re going to wake up. Understand?”

“I—Hurry—!” He choked on a gasp.

“Five, you’re slowly drifting away from your happy place. The walls of the tree are disappearing from around you and you are coming back towards the sound of my voice.”

“He—it’s following—” He breathed out hard through his nose. “They don’t want me to leave.”

She leaned forward, concern blossoming, but it was shirked when she remembered her duties. “Four, it’s not real, Phillip. Only my voice is real. My voice is real and I’m calling you home.”

He gasped, head flailing, eyes rolling like in REM sleep inside of his skull.

“Three, you feel the weight returning to your body as you come back towards my voice. You feel the couch underneath you and you are more aware of your surroundings.”

“No, no! The pain-it’s-it’s coming back.” He sobbed. “My body’s on _fire_.”

“Two, you—”

But too soon, before he had even had the chance to fully awaken, his eyes popped open, the whites rolling and his limbs flailing. He gasped, sitting up and cradling his head, fingers rubbing through his hair vigorously.

“Phillip?” The old woman whispered, taken aback, coming to stand by him with hands hovering over his hunched back and visibly protruding shoulder blades and spinal column pressing at the fabric on his torso, hesitating as if she did not know whether to touch him or not. She did.

Then she flinched away when he looked up quickly, dark eyes red rimmed and full of some sort of accusatory, beleaguering expression that she had never seen on him before. He breathed harshly, using both palms to swipe tears from his face and staring at her like a man possessed—as if she were an intruder he had never met before.

Then he threw up on her expensive heels.

“…When she was pregnant with her child, true to the curse placed on her by the witch, the queen was not able to sleep at all. Not a single wink. She would lie in bed next to her husband, the king, all night, wide awake; as if she had already been sleeping for forever and a half. And when the sun would rise and the woman had to go about her royal duties, she would do so sluggishly and with ill-contempt for those who came into contact with her, as is the mood of a person who has not rested in weeks.” There was a soft rustling as the very young woman licked her finger and turned the page of the very large, very old storybook. Her young son, barely two years old, lay snuggled against her breast, soft lashes like corn silk brushing the apples of his cheeks as he drifted in and out of sleep.

Her own mother had read to her from this tome, nearly twenty years passed now, and she saw how the sun bleached binding that was still smooth to the touch, as it had always been, was nearly the same color as her own baby’s hair. But, as is the curse of growing up, she could tell that it would be darkening more within the coming months and had the potential to even become as raven black as her own father’s! But even still, her father was a handsome man and hopefully her boy—who was quite small for his age—would grow to be even half as strong and kind as he.

“The queen’s husband became slowly and then quickly more alarmed by her state until one day, after sentencing her long-time faithful handmaiden to death after she failed to draw a warm enough bath (which the king pardoned, of course), he insisted that his wife go and speak with the other witch of their land. The other witch, who was equally as crafty, sinister, and devious as her twin, lived clear across the kingdom, to the very near shadow of the end, in the exact opposite direction of her sister. It took the queen many more sleepless nights of travel, along with her faithful maidens, to reach the hut in the bog that was nearly identical to the others’. In fact, the queen was so taken aback by the striking similarities, that she was convinced they had traveled in the wrong direction back to the place from before on accident. She was about to sentence another of her handmaidens to death when the straw door to the hut opened and the witch irritatedly bid them to come in.

“The queen begged help and told the new witch her tale of woe; how she had not been able to become pregnant by her husband, though she tried hard, for many, many years. How, as a last resort and knowing that it would probably end poorly for her, against better judgment, she visited the witch who lived to the far north of the kingdom, just before the shadows that signaled the end of the world. How that witch made her swear all of the southernmost kingdom to her ownership in return for a healthy baby boy. And, how, as was her greedy way, instead of just eating one newly bloomed, pastel flower from the witch’s garden, as instructed, she had had two in hopes of giving her son a sibling for him to love as he grew. But she had been caught! And the witch who had before been all-to-willing to help cursed the woman so that, while she remained pregnant with the two babies, she may have the nightly rest of a mother with twenty children.”

The soft rustle of the paper against her sleep shirt as she turned the page. The soft rustle of her son’s lashes against her collarbone as he turned into her neck and his breathing became deep. She breathed deeply the smell of his fine hair and baby powder skin.

“The second witch, outraged to hear that her sister now owned the entire lower kingdom and everything therein including, technically, her hut and the bog it sat in, agreed to help in return for rights to the northernmost part of the kingdom. She told the woman that the only way to remove the curse and ensure that it did not follow her out of pregnancy would be for her to, finally after nearly several months, fall asleep. The queen was desperate and swore that she would try anything, much to the witch’s delight.”

“Father, I have a confession to make.”

Father Abaddon looked up from where he sat at his desk, doing paperwork.

“What is it, Phillip?”

The young man grinned, boyishly sly but also a bit embarrassed, motioning to the notes of the essay the man had set him on. “I’ve been reading the bible all of my life and I don’t quite know the difference between the Old and New Testament. I mean—besides the obvious.”

Father Abaddon set down the sermon he had been tending after and stretched backwards, old bones popping cracking in their joints sickeningly. It was becoming very late and he yawned, but Phillip was not allowed to leave his bible study until he had completed all of the work the priest had assigned him. The Father was one of the leaders of the high school population of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School and was also very influential in the imposing, grand, and truly awe-inspiring cathedral that it served. This was where his family had gone to church every Sunday since he could remember and so he had known the man (in theory) nearly all of his life, but had only truly spoken to him privately in this setting since he had become too sick to go to classes and Sunday mass. It was easier this way because he did not have to feel guilty about suddenly becoming sick, but also because he could not bear to have the hordes of strangers who knew him only through his mother and were of no other consequence to speak to him so intimately about how this sickness was to be, “All according to God’s plan.” It truly boggled how some things that had never bothered him in life—the Sunday crowds that bloomed out of the pews after services and into the entrance full of hands to shake, fake smiles to flash, and endless personal endearments and banal questions from humans who, in all likelihood, did not even remember his name—were so suddenly the greatest annoyance and injustice there could possibly be.

When the man was able to meet with him (often very late Sunday evenings) he would pack a great deal of supplementation into his readings and their conversations. He was a very stern man, a very righteous man, a very demure, austere, and unsympathetic man. In short—a true man of God. And Phillip had Avery to teach him everything he _wanted_ to know, yes, but it was only a true man of God who could teach him everything he _needed_ to.

“The Old Testament,” The man began, fixing his glasses and fixing Phillip with a stare under bushy, gray brows, “In essence, to begin, is a book about ‘the beginning’. Before Jesus, the Lamb of God, came to die for our sins, God commanded the Jewish people to sacrifice a pure lamb to atone for their wrongdoings. This is the part of the Bible where God punishes his people with the, ‘Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ law so that the murderers are murdered along with the adulterers and occultists. It’s about many characters and how their doings and destinies weave in and out, connecting them to one another, connecting them to the wrath of God. It’s a prophecy of what is to come, a Messiah, a foundation of law that we must live off of.” He paused to allow Phillip the chance to take notes. “The New Testament is the validation of the prophecy of the Messiah, the coming of Christ, and is almost exclusively about his destiny and sacrifice. About the mercy of God in giving us, his undeserving flock, a chance at receiving forgiveness. It is the culmination of all that came before and it is, of course, the end.”

They shared a long, peaceful but still very unarming silence after that, only broken by the echoing off of the high ceiling of their synched pencils scratching on paper and Phillip’s occasional coughing and then by the rumbling of his stomach as he hungered. But Father Abaddon, as always, was stoic and serene, body unburdened by earthly things.

It was coming up on nine-thirty (just a tad over for these late night sessions, but Phillip had found it very hard to concentrate on his essays with his eyelids so heavy and heart and breath so slow in pattern, as if he would fall asleep at his student’s desk at any moment, and he knew it was because of the pills that had been left out for him with a note that he had swallowed before walking the five blocks to the church) when the priest spoke again. They could sometimes go the whole several hours without communicating besides Phillip asking to be excused to use the facilities (usually to hurl) so what happened next was maybe a bit unusual, but he did not question the authority figure.

“Your mother tells me your sister is with child.”

Phillip started when the Father spoke across the hills of textbooks and loose student papers and maps and scripture and hymns and other such literature that wallpapered the cluttered office.

“Is she planning on announcing the pregnancy this coming Sunday to the congregation?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, Father.”

“Oh no?”

“I don’t talk to my mother much. Or my sister I suppose.”

“What about your stepfather? Can you confide in him?”

“Daryl isn’t married to my mom, sir.”

“Oh no?” The priest raised his bushy gray eyebrows all the way up to his bushy gray hairline and looked truly shocked. “But they’ve been coming together ever since your father passed.”

“Not passed, sir.” Phillip scribbled with one hand until the bones and tendons inside hurt and then would switch and repeat the process. He had always hated writing. “Disappeared.”

“But, in any case.” The man pressed on. “I had wanted to ask you what her intentions were with the child.”

“Her…intentions.” Phillip set down his pencil.

The Father waved his hand in expression. “If she and the father were planning on raising the baby in the church. I had heard that she’d expressed interest in leaving to pursue her…newer passions.”

Phillip sighed and rubbed his eyes hard with the balls of his palms and then his scalp where the hair had again grown grimy and sweat-slicked despite the chill of the church and his having showered before he came. It was as if he were destined to always be covered in a thin layer of filth.

“I think she wants to go live in New York or California. Or Chicago, at least. She always talks about going where the protests are.”

“Serving one’s country with body, mind, and soul is nearly as important as serving one’s God. Don’t you agree, Phillip?”

Phillip didn’t necessarily feel strongly either way but nodded, sipping from his glass of water only to realize it was bone dry.

“I’ve read in the papers of people doing…drastic things to protest the war. Burning their draft cards, burning their bodies…” The old man shook his head in disgust. “Truly Hell on earth. I fear we are soon entering the end times. Or, at least, the end of civilized society.” He seemed to brighten up a bit at his next thought. “Which is why I wanted to talk about your sister’s soul and that of her unborn child.”

Phillip, harkening back to a thought he had had earlier when writing about Revelations, asked, “Father, what do you know about demonic possession?”

Suddenly the man looked very serious.

“Do you believe your sister and her unborn child are possessed by a demon?”

“I’m sorry? Oh, no, no, nothing like that. I was wondering for the assignment.”

“I see.”

“Sir, could I be excused for a moment? I need to take my pain medication.”

The priest looked sour but acquiesced. “Hurry back, child. This night grows longer and darker by the moment—I don’t want you to have to walk home at midnight. The Lord will protect all of those in his house, but outside…”

In the hallway, Phillip wet his dry throat with icy water from the fountain and then stood, wiping his mouth and shivering. The corridors of his former school were strange and alien enough after months of leave, let alone at late night when the only light to see by was from that which filtered in from under the door of Father Abaddon’s office and that which filtered in through the very high and looming windows. But that was only moonlight and was nothing to do tasks by, so he could hardly see the glass he held in shaking hands under the stream of the water fountain. It was as cold and black as Lake Michigan—the kind of deep, dark, penetrating cold that numbed the senses in addition to the flesh in a way that almost burned rather than chilled. To save money, the school did not use heating or air conditioning (which were each already faulty and unreliable) after six o’clock in both the institution and attached church and also did not turn them back on until an hour before students were to begin arriving for classes, thus ensuring many a first period over the years where the nun who was teaching’s breath had clearly been visible as she lectured, stoically, unfeeling.

The night was not gentle or good and howled and screamed and shook the windows in their casings like the prisoner at the bars of his cell, but from the opposite way, as if the night wanted desperately to come inside rather than escape outwards.

Phillip gently rolled the blue capsules around his palm and watched them rest in the rivers and valleys there. Life line, love line—his sister had taken up fortune telling briefly one summer several years back after seeing a film about a gypsy and a handsome man, “—who bewitched each other equally,” (the girl had sighed, lost in a dream). She had explained one morning, holding his right hand tightly while he tried to eat cereal with his left, what each blemish, each indentation, each miniscule mark meant and how they told the tale of his life.

“It looks like you’re going to fall in love with a tall brunette. Ooooh!” She grinned and waggled her eyebrows to contrast Phillip’s scowl.

“It does not say that.” He had yanked his hand away so he could again pick up the hymn he was trying to learn for choir.

“Wait—it doesn’t end well. Don’t you want to knoooow?” She had whined, reaching for his other hand and causing the spoon to slip from his grasp.

The subsequent clatter and argument that broke out over the spilt milk prompted Daryl to yell from upstairs where he was trying to nap to, “Cut that shit out!”

It wasn’t until their mother had caught her daughter reading the twin’s and little Sammy’s palms at Phillip and Sammy’s joint birthday sleepover (they had always shared since theirs were so close together) that she had banned all manner of fortune telling, witchcraft, astrology, and anything that could be construed as unchristian from their home, sighting passages in the bible that told, in essence, of the knowledge of the future being only for God’s eyes and mind. And Daryl had added from his place on their couch, beer in hand, that it was un-American, too.

But the boy had to wonder then at the nature of future telling and what it meant to be able to perform such a task if, indeed, it was for the eyes of the Lord only. He found himself thinking on things that he maybe shouldn’t have for where he stood very often those days—thoughts that bordered on blasphemous if they were considered too hard; Had He always existed? A continuous loop of omnipotence that does not pause, falter, begin or end but simply is and always has been? It was a hard concept to wrap his mind around (the dogma he was dedicated to, had known all of his life but was like the answer given without the question asked first) so he had decided long ago that it was either brilliant or ridiculous. Did God know what would happen before it did, or was his guess as good as any mortal man’s, whose life was so short and inconsequential? Does he warp man’s mind and help make the choices that will lead, one hundred generations down the line, to the great undoing of a single one or does he just set out the path and let each decide, knowing, without a doubt, that they will end in the end either way? Or had he, in the few milliseconds or five million years right before time and all in that domain burst violently into existence, seen everything that would ever occur in all of the universes and simply done nothing but watch as the play of life unfolded in tragedy and comedy alike? (Here, always, a little voice he quickly shushed would wonder what the point of a God was, then.) Did that mean that he, Phillip, had always, in a sense, existed as well? Was every single moment already mapped in the cells of his DNA—from the minute swirls in the flesh of his palm to what he had worn that day or whether he took his pain medication? Was it all set, all relevant?

He wanted to believe there was a man like some absentee, but still essentially there Father who cared whether he was still breathing in his bed and heart still beating when the dawn of the next day came, each night its own hard battle nearly lost. He had also heard talk in certain religious circles that man was inherently evil and had been born that way since the first man stood upright in the Garden. This was not something he wanted, in turn, to believe; that everything bad and nefarious was already laid out in a path before him and that he had no choice but to accept his own demons before he had been given the decision to make, before his life had been allowed to bloom. That his fate had already been long cast and sufferings set in stone. Or worse, that he had been born with a debt, charged in a way, that only a terrible death could atone for.

He wanted to believe that there could be no such thing as a long, wretched, in extremis path already connecting his mother’s womb to his deathbed, had to know that God would not write off so easily one to whom he had so recently breathed life into. All according to God’s plan. He had to believe for fear of what the alternative could be, and so the thing was half real already.

Phillip watched as the blurred outline of a figure who had been leaning halfway around the corner in the blackness slowly retreated.


	5. Part One, Pages 41-50

The boy had stared at it a long time as he held his pills, contemplating, as humans do, if it was really what he thought he was seeing—specter, wraith, phantom. At the very far end of the hall past the long horizon of lockers, the thing had been so still and stood for so long that he had had himself convinced that it was just a trick of the light. But there was no light. And no member of the janitorial staff would have behaved in such a way even if they were there so late into the night.

“Phillip.”

Phillip gasped loudly, the breath echoing in the huge, empty space, bringing his hands up to shield himself by reflex and dropping the cup. It cracked. The cracking echoed.

Father Abaddon stood silhouetted by his open office door, the odd light casting black shadows across his front and wrinkled, old face framed by darkness but equally odd look upon it clear as day.

“You’ve been gone for almost twenty minutes.” The gray-haired man said, tone unclear, watching the boy bend quickly but stiffly, painfully to retrieve the dropped cup that had rolled under the lockers. “Who were you talking to? Just now?”

“Hmm? Oh, no one.” Phillip said when he stood straight again. There was a long vein from the top of the thin glass to the bottom and it would probably be useless in again ever holding liquid. As he rolled it in his palm, inspecting, he gasped a second time, though more softly, when a piece of that man-made material broke the delicate flesh of his thumb and plunged in shallowly, in a line that mirrored the cut in the glass, from root to tip of the appendage.

He would have cursed, though he was not usually apt to at all, had the holy man not been in his presence. Stupid, stupid! Every cut for him could potentially be a death sentence. Already the vital fluid dripped down the vessel in a warm line from where he held it, seeping into the miniscule cracks and fissures and pooling like slow, sweet honey into the clear bottom. Drip, drip, bubble, bubble.

The little blue capsules he had brought out with him were long gone.

In his office, the priest sat hard, groaning, and with one of the essays the boy had written clutched tight in his hand as he inspected it.

“It’s not finished, to be sure, but you can always do that at home and bring it next Sunday with you.”

“Yes, Father.” Phillip was quickly gathering his notebooks and pencils and loose papers into his bag, still shaken by what he had seen, or, what he’d thought he’d seen, or, what had seen him, and it _almost_ made him not care that he had homework. But then, he was a teenager. He had pulled the gauze compress that the priest had given him blisteringly tense around his finger so that it was nearly purple with exertion and still that flushed-wine ichor, watery, diluted, dribbled out from around the edges and stained whatever light surface he brushed. Every small wound was a gaping maw that never stopped drooling, only dried up from exhaustion.

“But I did want to ask you before you went, Phillip,” The man took off his tiny spectacles and let them hang by the gold chain around his neck so that he could meet the boy’s light eyes unobstructed. “I’m not sure how to put this delicately, but then it is not a delicate subject to broach. For as long as I’ve known her, your sister has been a member of the unguided, ungodly youth who are set to soon inherit this country. It’s a shame that I had not met her in early childhood as I did you, but maybe it was already too late.”

Phillip.

The boy tossed his head over his shoulder in the direction he had heard his name hissed, blood like muddy, frigid lake water in his cold veins. Through the door and in the dark nothingness he could see as he held it propped open, in the motions of leaving, there was only empty hallway.

Drip, drip onto the red carpet at his feet and gone forever.

“I fear for the life of the child. These are very troubling times and young people are turning to alternative methods when it comes to unwanted pregnancies. Abandonment, abortions.” He made a disgusted face. “You must be the guardian of that child, Phillip. You are a man of God who has grown up in the church and you must know what’s best even when others don’t. Even when they are weak, as women tend to be, you must be strong. Do you know what her intentions are with the babe?”

“I…don’t understand, sir.”

“Talk to her. Persuade her to marry the father if she knows who he is. Remind her that the only thing more shameful than an unwed mother is one who would kill her child. And if that is not an option, let her know there are plenty of members of the congregation who would adopt the baby rather than see it aborted. Like the Christianson family who have been trying to conceive since they were wed two summers ago.” He stared at the boy from under those huge, ill-defined brows, domineering in a way. Like a man could get lost in them. “Hanna Christianson is infertile.”

“But, I don’t understand what aborted means.”

“Oh, my son,” He leaned in very close now like it was the most scandalous, wretched gossip. “An abortion is the most hated and heinous act against God that a woman could possibly commit. It is the murder of her child so that he is not born.”

Phillip was speechless. His thumb was numb.

“There are ladies who would go through any number of extremes to dispose of the baby—to squander the gift they’ve been given. They drink poisons that make them go into premature labor and the fetus is expelled from the womb like—like—malformed, bloody mucus from the nose.” He took in Phillip’s horrified reaction at the description.

“Bloody—“

“Mucus.”

“I didn’t know—I mean, I hadn’t heard—” The boy gulped. “I’ve heard her talking on the phone about the doctor. I didn’t know—“

“They crush the abdomen so the baby is pressed out like toothpaste, they open the woman up like a cow carcass and remove the child like a cancerous growth. Or they take electrodes and scramble him like an egg and suck him out with a hose!” Father Abaddon was becoming so angry that spittle was projected from his leathery, old lips whenever he spoke and his face was an oddly blotched combination of blood-shot in portions and bloodless in others. “In these clinics—these places that people like your sister, Phillip, are protesting to have legalized across the nation—they have stacks of dead fetuses at different levels of gestation. Tiny, rotting corpses smeared in their own birthing juices, bloody bodies decomposing in heaps and then thrown out with the garbage come Wednesday.”

The Holy man sat back in his chair, dark button down shirt and white clerical collar becoming more saturated with sweat at each passing moment. He let loose a shaking breath. “Truly, truly, the lesser of the species, but not quite so ‘gentle’ as they would have you think. The Devil comes in many forms, Phillip. Did I answer your question?”

His own footfalls reverberating off of the metal lockers and smooth, asbestos-tiled floors were perturbing and what the Father had described shook him in a sort of empathetic place that had not felt much stimulation for quite some time. Jarring, frightening, explicit images resonated in his mind as he neared the corner way down the hall where the hazy, humanoid figure had vanished and he knew he would vomit from the stress of it all. He rounded the corner, knuckles white on the straps of the bag over his shoulders and his stomach felt cold and hot at the same time but moving downward with a liquidy fluidity like it would fall right out through his guts.

There was only another twin, dark, long hallway.

He kept steady and didn’t miss a beat, no matter what his heart did. That hurried thu-thump, thu-thump pulse moved even in his thumb where the blood flowing and savagely, carelessly free now, had long soaked the rutty-surfaced bandage through and dripped in a steady trail behind him that reminisced of fairy tales where children were afraid of getting lost on their path.

The winds outside violently ripped and clawed at the glass of each window Phillip passed as if they wanted to break inside so that they might violently rip and claw at his throat. Every few steps he took, above a locker or doorway or window, perched a miniature clay Jesus, no taller than 6 inches or so, on his execution cross, gaping, fetid wounds oozing a steady lifeblood while his sightless gaze lamented to his Father, and it was the only attempt at decoration to draw the eye. ‘Why?’ and, ‘How could you give me up to this fate? Was every moment of life only created for counting down to this one spectacular, cathartic death? Then what was the point of living at all?’

And then to compliment the messiah’s death, for every man bleeding out on the cross was a statute or portrait in the likeness of the Madonna and her child—plump and dumb and naive to all that he would become and what would become of him. He would lay in her arms as she stared upwards towards that same god as the Jesus at the end of his life does, but hers was the expression of a person not in agony but a proud ecstasy and who was truly ecstatic about the fate of the infant. ‘How strange and bizarre,’ as he would round another corner or go down a flight of stairs—muscles always tensed and body screaming, like standing on the tip of a razor sharp and thin edge above the void, about what he may encounter in the very dark—that the mother could be so calm about the decided fate of her brand new child. Was it because she had already accepted his death as the inevitable conclusion to his short life, thus mitigating any qualms and nulling resistance? Or was she in such a severe state of apathy about being forced to become pregnant and birth a child she had not asked for, regardless of whether she wanted him afterwards or not, that she could not force herself to be sad about his sacrificial murder?

But he had always loved Mary and looked to her as the ultimate symbol of affection and motherly tidings, so did not believe she could be so cruel. But what, then?

Phillip thought back to what Father Abaddon had said about the babies and the terrible, _so_ terrible, ways they would meet their ends before they even had time enough to be born—lives cut down before they had been allowed to bloom. And he saw himself. A young man, yes, but a babe too in that he was just beginning to realize as he lay on the cusp of manhood and something more monstrous that he, in fact, knew almost nothing about the world or how to take care of himself, much like an infant. The boy even had to still rely on his mother to know what medication to take each day. He was weakened, defenseless, confused, lonely, crying out into the void that lay underneath that watery horizon that tugged him closer and closer with each new tide and set of sun, that pulled him from the stunned silence of the razor’s edge between life and demise.

The boy was becoming very tired, his heart beating that scared, sacred mantra on his ribs and in his arteries, and he kneeled down to rest, back to the wall, panting, clutching his side and realizing why it was that he was bade by the powers that be not to attend class anymore. He could hardly walk five minutes straight without needing to sit or vomit and could hardly sit without falling asleep. Physicality aside, the medication that clouded and warped and changed his mind whenever he took it could have, quite possibly, prevented him from learning anything at all. And then, what was the point? It was still very dark in the labyrinthine halls with all of the lights out, but he knew from haunting this same ground for many years that he was almost to the back parking lot where the shortcut home began.

He had been charged, sure as anything, with protecting the not-yet life of his would-be niece or nephew. But how? No one listened to him and they never had—especially not his sister. Especially not now that he was slowly metamorphosing into this disease ridden hunk of walking flesh and organ and connective tissue. They all treated him like he was lesser, baser, already long since in the earth and decomposing. Like his voice carried no pitch and touch no weight or temperature, less substantial than air itself. But he had, in fact, been charged and by not a regular man but one who had given up his life to be used as a vessel for God. And as God’s mouthpiece, this charge was not a trivial dare or casual suggestion but concrete and binding contract.

Sometimes Phillip wondered at what life would have been like to be born a woman and imagined that he very much would have liked to have been a mother if, for no other reason, than to experience pregnancy. If only God could just take the babe out and put it inside Phillip’s guts instead.

Tap, tap, tap.

The boy’s neck jerked up and with it his whole frame. He stood so quickly that the blood didn’t have time enough to go back to his brains and he was dizzy but he didn’t care because now was the ghosting hour, the wicked time, where every bad thing came out to torment the already well tormented. He was running and the lactic acid built up in his calf muscles in the beginning stages of a very mild, wasted atrophy called laziness burned but he didn’t care because he was beginning to realize that he had come to long since overstay his welcome in every sense of the term. The bile spilled out of his esophagus and into his mouth and tasted bitter and acidic and dribbled down his chin but he didn’t care because the fogged handprint left on the pane of the window that had been right in front of him was only just beginning to fade as he ran past all of the bloody, dying Jesuses nailed haphazardly to wood like a child’s birdhouse project and the mother’s with their babies held tight to their breasts. Men with their abdomens slit and organs spilling out and faces wretched into wails of frustration and morbid acceptance and pale, beautiful, clean women serene and smiling and kneeling and holding innocent babes that reached out and touched their faces in that soft way that infants do, and grotesque fingers clawing but held down, muscles taught and twisted painfully as bodies convulsed or were stricken with rigor mortis, and gentle eyes turned up in laughter and cheeks rouged with the pink of virgin innocence and curiosity, and diseased, black blood that dripped down their foreheads and chests and thighs and boiled with an intense rage and hatred of all humanity, faces twisted in wrath, in joy, faces that stared in from the windows at all sides, holy ghosts whispered about by children that could not possibly be real, happy men alive and muscles taught and skin tanned from the kiss of the sun and hateful mothers with clawed hands and blood in their eyes and on their lips and withered, wrinkled, milkless breasts that tossed their children to the alligators and blood-spattered infants in piles on the sterile floor of a doctor’s office—

Phillip pushed open the heavy double doors that led out into the back parking lot, calmly, heart steady as if he had seen nothing at all in the dark, wiping the bile on the sleeve of his letterman as a second thought.

Outside, the swirling, biting night wind and storm were angrier than they had masqueraded as and stole leaves off of the trees and the cap off of his head like a twig taken by the riptide. He brought his hand up too late and smeared a fine line of that sweet red wine across his forehead. It dripped down slowly, drip, drip.

He pressed his head down against the prevailing imperceptible forces that made his jacket flutter on his skeletal frame and his hair ripple on his scalp and his leather backpack lift off and beat against his back in a haphazard thrum. Walking was difficult and off balance and the biting cold gnawed at his flesh with sharp toothed hunger and, once it crawled inside, made a bed in bones and muscles and tissue where it settled in deep hibernation.

Oh, he wished briefly he had brought a scarf to keep taloned, blistering wind off of his neck or gloves likewise for his shaking fingers or boots that would hold down his pants and keep the chill from creeping up inside. But, as was the case with his pills and his food and his hygiene, if his mother did not mention it, then he often would forget.

And besides, the cold seemed to numb a bit of the internal pain that pulsed and surged like the beat of a rhythmic tempo that only he seemed to be able to hear as the blood inside hemorrhaged more.

Snap!

His footfalls on the leaf splayed sidewalk bounced off of the cement (Avery said Romans had invented cement and that had just about blown Phillip’s mind) and echoed all around even as the wind whipped the pretty painted things up by his face in mini twisters and his pink rimmed ears were only filled with the sounds of his own breathing and the crunch of the twigs and leaves. His face had sunk into the collar of his shirt and his hands crisscrossed under his armpits and his shivering was becoming so violent that his teeth jostled in his mouth and the air tasted like ice fire and burned. He was only a short ways into his neighborhood and did not live too far but knew soon he’d have to break or risk collapse—

Snap!

Phillip let the wind pull his face in a fluid, gentle caress towards the heavily wooded area as it had been trying to all along, directing his field of vision into the very thick darkness that seemed to stretch on sempiternally and the large, dark animal that had been following him along at a distance for quite a while. He had ignored the huge stag, blackened by the night, paying it no mind as those animals were as common as railroads and tweakers in this town. He had thought it would leave when it realized he had no food, but it had persisted. It halted when he did and waited.

He squinted into the shadows and past the deep, broad trees and deep, broad forest and deep, broad nighttime to the partially obscured creature maybe fifty feet away who was unusually thin and lithe and ragged looking and not very tall at all, though his gray horns were huge and imposing and likewise deeply set and broad. He looked emaciated and only about as big around as a grown man and his limbs were like sticks. The animal seemed to be staring right into his face, observing his violent shivering with a calm sentience that was unnerving. Maybe it would attack him, it looked hungry enough. But the creature only stood for a very long while, not in that tense way that a deer would stand when it is considering if it should turn tail and run in its own defense, but in a way that made the young man feel as if it were considering _him_ ; head slightly cocked, whole body turned in his direction, completely still. Still. Violently, relentlessly still like the calm in the middle of the storm as the storm did tear through them and whipped around and as if it sensed the weakness in him and the death stench on his skin and breath and in the way he felt as if he were about to blow chunks again or pass out or both. He waited, feeling compelled, then he gasped as the animal tilted its head and the light of the half moon glinted off of its bare skull.

Then it stood up.

Phillip leaned sideways against the pastel tiled countertop in his mother’s kitchen, stirring a huge silver bowl of marble cake batter. He couldn’t stand for long periods of time even hours after a transfusion, but some days were better than others and this was more than worth the weakened trembling in his calves and thighs and nauseous sort of headache. The bandage wrapped tightly around his thumb and stiches under that made it hard to use the digit for anything useful and he feared, as had already come to pass, that the little strings of nylon or flesh surrounding would tear again, even nearly a week after the injury. He checked the temperature of the oven on the meter and decided it needed a few more minutes to heat. Then, slumping forward and pressing heavily on the surface of the counter, breathing in short bursts through his nose, he read the Interesting Recipes section on the back of the cake mix box. Oooh, mini cake lollipops!

His family’s kitchen, like his family’s entire house, played at a demure sort of eloquence in its size and gourmet but quite outdated fixtures and features and style. At its inception, the small mansion promised to become very grandiose in design, but had not been updated in almost a decade and there were even still parts like the long unfinished pool and backyard landscaping that only served to remind of a string of tragedies and bad luck that had convinced their mother that the entire undertaking must be cursed.

It wasn’t until Daryl moved in a few months after that their mother had awoken as if from a very long dream or murky existence and her life had commenced as seamlessly as if no one had ever perished in the first place. It was with no warning, no words of acknowledgment, Phillip recalled, just as when his sister moved in several years later. Only, “Phillip, this is Daryl. He’s going to be living here now. We certainly have enough room. Don’t make that face, young man!” But really, that was how his mother did all things. Whenever she found some weed in his sister’s room or a new phone number from a boy she met in a bar or at a protest, it would be gone without a word. Same for Phillip with some of the books Avery had lent him, like one about magic and dwarves and elves and ‘hobbit people’. One day it was on his nightstand next to his pills and the next it was as vanished as wholly and quickly as the ghost that lingers in the corner of the eye but is gone when looked at head on. Of course, when he asked her, the woman only remained silent or told him that she hadn’t seen the novel and he shouldn’t read about witchcraft and magic. He had heard her say once that she didn’t “enjoy confrontation” and when he asked her what she meant by that she was again silent. In any case, it was the second book of Avery’s in the past month that he had not been able to return and, though the man was all good spirits, Phillip had felt much conspired against, himself.

Scrappy the Cat leapt up on the countertop and began noisily chomping on the crunchies he found in a bowl there. They made eye contact and the thin, middle-aged brown-and-gray tabby fixed him with the angriest glare an animal could possibly contort its features into.

Really, it was just the plains and valleys of the poor old boy’s face. He had a certain way of staring at things with head turned down and eyes turned up that made him look absolutely vicious. But Scrappy the Cat was, in reality, the tamest of their pets and, as if to emphasize this, nuzzled into Phillip’s gentle scratches and let loose a high-pitched, whining meow that did not match his grumpy gaze or regality. His twitching tail flirted with the flame of the homemade candle marked ‘Spiced Rum Pie’ that sat fat and stoic on the counter.

The boy’s older sister, spying him from around the corner slyly on her way out the door, stopped and observed as he read a few lines from the box, one hand occupied with the feline’s arching back. Then she came bounding around the corner and smacked his tiny rear end through his loose slacks, one cheek and then the next, like the bongo drum she had taken up playing when she wanted to be a jazz musician in Chicago or Indianapolis and then had lost interest in.

“Stop.”

She stuck her finger in the middle of the bowl and brought it out, licking innocently, no gravitas.

“Stop!”

She giggled.

“You’re high.”

The alien familiarity of the situation was very strange—a sickening sort of nostalgia. Unsure of how it made him feel, only that he knew it wasn’t good. Like an unspoken understanding to play pretend, to gloss over everything that had occurred in the past few months that threatened to ostracize them from each other for good. She wore a hemp-knit poncho and hemp-woven cap over her long, golden hair.

“What time is it, old witch?”

“I dunno.”

“Don’t you remember that game?”

“From when we were kids, yeah.”

“What time is it, old witch?”

Phillip glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Nine.”

“One. Two. Three. Four—” She came up next to him, counting each step, but let the joke go when she sensed his tensed mood.

“What are you making this for?”

“None of your business. It’s not for you, obviously.”

“It’s not for you. _Obviously_.”

“It’s for my friend’s birthday.”

She looked at him seriously. “Cool. Righteous.” Then, thinking. “Your...friend?”

“Avery.”

“Aaah.” She leaned backwards but made sure to keep a distance. “You think he’ll come on his birthday?” She rubbed Scrappy the Cat’s face with both hands when he nuzzled at her pot poncho

“Of course he will.”

“He’s a pretty hip guy. I think he’d rather be out partying with his friends.”

“…”

“N’ get a sub. Y’know?”

“He wouldn’t do that.” They were silent.

“So,” He started, searching, wondering at anything he could say in an attempt to _connect_ , but only so that she wouldn’t ask him anything first. “How’s your job at the restaurant?”

“Oh, it’s good.” In truth, she hated her job at the restaurant. His sister had dropped out of high school her second-to-last year to become, as she described it, a ‘full time protestor’, but found in the process that she had also had to become a part time waitress. It was a good restaurant in a bad part of town and she often became irritated driving by the panhandlers every day. “Except then I realize that they’re kind of the people I’m fighting for, y’know? And then I feel bad.”

“Mmhm.” He grunted.

“Oh!” The girl gasped at once, remembering something juicy she had heard earlier that day whilst chatting with the other servers and passing around a joint in the parking lot behind her work. “Guess who just came out as homosexual?”

“Who?”

“One of my ex-boyfriends, Greg! Or was it Gary?”

Phillip couldn’t help himself and snickered maliciously.

“What’s that?”

“Isn’t he the second of your exes to turn into a fairy?”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know…”

“That I should get them together?” The girl grinned.

“Pfft.” Phillip crossed his arms, becoming uncomfortable. “Father Abaddon says homosexuality is a sin. That those kinds of men are just like women and, uh, you don’t want to know what he thinks about them.”

“Oh, Philly,” The girl sighed, hard, holding Scrappy the Cat in her arms though he meowed and protested loudly. “Don’t be so close-minded.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I remember when mother found you kissing cousin Rodney in grandma’s crawl space. Do you recall?” She dropped the cat when he bit her but still laughed heartily. “You were going to get married!”

He flushed, becoming angry. “That was child’s play and I haven’t talked to Rodney in years. All I’m saying is that we’ve learned all of our lives about people who live…that sort of way and what they’ll do to pervert your mind. You need to be careful—it isn’t just you anymore.”

The kettle atop the stove whistled loudly and pierced the veil of awkwardness.

“You’re making tea?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Why?”

“I dunno.”

“Avery drinks a lot of tea, right?”

“Yes, he gave this to me.” Phillip showed her a little orange package that read, ‘Royal British Tea Co. Earl Grey Tea’.

“Earl Grey? Who’s that?”

“I think he’s the prince of England.”

“Aah.”


	6. Part One, Pages 51-60

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is very appreciated. Please let me know what you think.

Phillip opened the package and a pleasant smell swelled up and blossomed outward like a rose as it rose. It was like something he had smelled before—a sluggish, desultory scent that was warm and comforting—but he couldn’t place it and knew he had never tasted the oil-infused leaves before. But how quaint. It was as if every sound, every smell, ever sensation was working in conjunction to dissemble his senses, as if he were to remember something that he desperately could not.

“Hey, that smells really good.” His sister peered over his shoulder.

There were several of the fragrant bags in the package.

“Would you like some?”

“Mmm…” She looked at her watch like she had to boot soon. “I’ve got time.”

They placed the delicate little bags in their mugs and each poured the scorching water to the top, steam rising. Then they let it steep. The boy knew he would have to rest soon. He wanted to eat, but the shifting in his guts told him he would not be able to keep anything down.

“Scrambled eggs,” The young woman sang softly under her breath as she waited for the drink to cool. “Oh, my baby, how I love your legs…”

Phillip tasted the drink and said nothing.

“Oh, yuck,” His sister made a face as she sipped the black tea. “There’s not much flavor. It’s just like hot water.” She made as if to pour it down the sink.

“Hey, wait!” Her brother countered. “If you don’t want it, just leave it for me.”

“You don’t look like you like it either.”

“Well,” He continued to hold his hot mug and let the steam rise up into his face. “It’s from England. I don’t want to waste it.”

“Engarland?”

He cracked a smile at the familiar inside joke—an expression of their shared grandmother who lived in the most rugged, mountainous, cactus-eating, coyote-shooting, scorpions-in-your-bathtub part of Texas.

“Aww,” She scratched at his dirty hair in the same way she had the cat’s. “I forgot you could smile, baby brother.”

He pulled away to begin pouring his batter into a medium sized cake pan, part of a much larger collection. At one time, their mother had been a glorious baker and so possessed all of the equipment she would need to create angel food cakes, strawberry cupcakes, tart apple pies, molasses cookies, pumpkin whoopee pies, banana nut bread. But in the last few years she hadn’t found much time for hobbies, only the holiest of ghosts.

“Do you remember,” He started, speaking slowly as he concentrated and using the wooden spoon to shape delicate swirls between the yellow and brown batters. “The scary story grandpa used to tell us when we were kids?”

“Mmm, no.” The girl had a bad enough memory as it was, let alone when her eyes and mind were clouded by the perpetual thunderhead of hash she and many others of her generation walked in. When he had caught her the first time, maybe three or more years ago, with one of her boyfriends in her room, it had been confusing to say the least. He had become accustomed to the innocence youth had afforded—the bland, safe asexuality that two children could share in play no matter what gender, like there was no question, that had been the basis for their brief and inconsequential relationship thus far—and did not think twice about barging into her room without warning, original question dying on his lips while many more bloomed like choking weeds. And there she had lain, naked, open, stupid drug-high, sex-high grin on her face as her bare breasts heaved in riotous laughter.

“Baby brother!” She had giggled and her male companion, sated and dazed, grinned too and winked at a young Phillip before sliding his hand back along the line of her body and under the thin sheet that did little to hide the rhythmic, swirling motions. The giggling had intensified, but her look was baleful. “Nooo! Not in front of my brother.”

The room had reeked of that potent and intoxicating herb—had reeked of something else equally potent and intoxicating that his young body, just on the edge of pubescence, had understood and reacted to before his mind did. At that time he had known absolutely nothing about physical intercourse or the intricate intercourse of relationships beyond platonacy. It wasn’t like they talked about _it_ or drugs in school or church (beyond warning that these were the instruments of temptation for the Devil to lure his victims into a life of disease and wretched misery) and he _definitely_ hadn’t learned about it from his mother. When he had asked his sister about it much later, demurely, embarrassingly, after having avoided the girl for nearly a week, she, equally embarrassed, had explained what the drug was and why it made her think, do, feel the way she did. She told him though that, more than anything, why it was important for her to do it was because ‘The Man’ didn’t want her to. Phillip did not know who this man was, like an unseen, absentee Father, and suspected that his sister didn’t either from the vague peripherals she spoke of in her description, but he understood more than ever now as he had not before the need young people had to rebel against the unseen hand that held them down in any small way possible. Not that he’d ever admit to her that he felt a similitude with her beliefs in any way.

But when he harkened back to that time (usually with a certain level of disgust or contempt for the girl, and he had to point to it as probably being the definitive moment when whatever loving relationship that had been trying to break through the cold, hard ground of winter finally withered, exhausted, and died) it was again with a pang of regret and melancholy tidings when he realized that no one human had touched him lovingly, or even casually, physically, in a way other than that of pure medical necessity for quite a substantially few months. He envied everyone the intimacy of hugs and handshakes that he had so taken for granted.

“Baby brother?” The girl questioned, her finger swirling the same delicate patterns in the batter he had taken up and then stopped, deep in thought about very scary things. She licked the sweetness off slowly.

“No, no, you do remember. It was a story all of those poor rednecks and hunters in Leakey believed. About the black…” He waved his hand in the air, thinking, fingers snapping. “Stag. The black stag.”

“Sorry, I don’t.”

“I hate when you’re like this. God, it’s like talking to a wall.”

She said nothing. Drip, drip the mixture of flour and sugar and egg and water rolled off the tips of her slim, feminine fingers and back into the silver bowl.

“It was about…a boy, I think, whose family was killed in their cabin by starvation, or cannibalism, or Indians, or wendigoes, or bears. I’m not sure. But he was raised by the deer of the forest and when the leader was shot and killed by a hunter, he killed the hunter and wore the stag’s skull like a war mask, rotting flesh and all. And the…bones all—” He clutched his stomach, grunting as a tremor of pain ran through his body and made his knees shake and muscles all over tense and shiver. “Turned…black…from _hate_. From the rot and from the boy’s pure hatred of humans and hunters and evil doers.”

“It sounds vaguely familiar, I guess.”

Toby the Cat lay on his side on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, sides twitching like they were being pulled by marionette strings embedded in the flesh, trying to open cabinet doors by cupping his little black sock paws. When he was finally able to swing one open, he climbed inside and disappeared.

“And he became the leader of the creatures of the forest and turned even the tame ones vicious so that they were never hunted or abused again, even long after the boy died, because his spirit would protect the forest, avenge against those who would take advantage.”

“What made you think of that old urban legend?” He had a feeling that she had, in fact, known what he was talking about all the while.

“I saw the black stag a few nights ago.”

“…”

“…”

“Phillip, no you didn’t. Please, don’t say things like that.”

“Why? Does it scare you?”

“More than you can know.”

“He won’t hurt you unless you do something bad. Like kill an innocent creature.”

“That’s not why I’m scared, Phillip.”

“I think it’s been following me lately or coming to me in my sleep. Or,” He grunted again, near doubling over in pain before he studied himself on the counter and stood taller. “If not that, then something like it.” He squinted, then closed his eyes and frowned in concentration.

“You know,” His sister gave him a conspiratorial smile over the rim of the mug as she breathed in the soothing smell of her cuppa, hand resting on her still svelte belly. “I remember when you were born. Even though I was still so young, too, but I remember. You were almost a whole month late.”

He looked at her.

“And you’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer, too…”

“It’s Billy’s baby, isn’t it?” Like a light switched turned down, suddenly—faster than a portion of a second—the playful glint in her eyes turned dark

She set down her mug and turned to him, face grim and set.

“What are you going to do?” He pushed, a small part of him finding twisted satisfaction in seeing the angel-haired hipster in a state of imperfection for what seemed like the first time since they’d met.

She was a child of coercion. Their mother had conceived and given birth when she still lived in the compound on that ranch in Texas where she was fed a steady diet of peyote and tomato juice and, by all accounts, though the woman would never admit it in the presence of her children, her only daughter was made in the spirit of deception. The woman had supposedly been a receptacle for the Antichrist himself to be born and bring about the end times, but instead when a baby girl was put in her arms, the fogginess of the drugs dissipating for a single moment of clarity, she knew both of their days were numbered and, soon after, made her escape. But Phillip was a product of _planning_. Maybe not love, necessarily, but he was wanted—no, needed, he had been told by Father Abaddon and countless other authoritative figures in family and education, to wash away all of the terrible things that came before and to prove that the woman was capable of being a real mother. And that had to count for something.

“It’s not a _crime_ ,” She hissed through clenched teeth, eyes narrowing. Scrappy the Cat laid his ears flat against his head and leapt down off the counter. “We’re not even real siblings.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “They aren’t even married!”

“Are you going to have an abortion?”

“Listen up, Phillip,” The woman unexpectedly advanced and the young, sickly boy hobbled back into the oven, empty batter bowl clambering to the floor, yelping when the metal surface burned him.

“Because, if you did that, you know you would break mom’s heart.”

“You know what’s breaking mom’s heart?” She stabbed him with an accusatory finger _jab jab jab_ , right in the sternum. “You know what’s killing our mother? You, Phillip. The way you ignore her when she talks to you, and how you sleep all day, and don’t eat, and say crazy things, and how you disappear for hours on end and you come back dirty or bloody or both. Where do you go, Phillip? Who do you talk to? What do you do?!”

As she spoke, any forbearance that the woman had practiced in the months before was gone and she advanced across the kitchen even as he backed away, clutching any surface he could for balance in all of his shock. Then, the backs of his shaking knees knocked against one of the chairs in the adorable little breakfast nook that had sold his parents on purchasing the house in the first place years ago and he sat _thump_ on his butt.

She stared at him a long while, eyes hard. “Do not pretend to know what it’s like being in my shoes—being a woman right now. With this fucking war going on, he could be taken away as soon as he turns eighteen. And then what? I’m supposed to raise a baby by myself in this racist, sexist, suburban hellhole? Who’s going to help me with it? Mom? Daryl? _You_? You don’t even know how to take care of yourself. You know even less about babies than me!” Then her lips broke into a sort of woebegone half-smirk. “Do you even _know_ how babies are made?”

He didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth again, eyes framed in shadow, as if to try to provoke him further. He had his mind set that he would bite her if she went to slap him.

As a reprieve, whoever his sister had been waiting on pulled into the driveway and honked once and, with no words, grabbing her coat and giving his shocked face a single backward glance, she was gone. Just as that, into the bitter cold night.

And he was alone.

Phillip left the tea where it was on the counter, stray drops running over and pooling at the base of the mugs, and made coffee instead. He had never liked the beverage in his youth, and truly the flavor never had grown on him (it was even worse than the blackest of teas, he was sure), but drinking it now just felt right. Adult, intelligent, like his father had been. Was. Wherever it was that he was.

And it had the added advantage of stimulating his bathroom activities which, because of the medicine and because of the disease each, had dwindled down to rare business, hard as he tried. Out of everything they told him he would no longer be able to do when the grandeurless road to The Cure started—exercise (not even the gentle ones he had always done to strengthen his joints), eat big meals, have relations (as if that were actually a concern)—they had never mentioned and he had never imagined taking a shit would top his list of the activities he missed most.

The young man overturned what was left in the small, silver sugar dish into his mug before he poured the steaming beverage—a bad habit that had started long ago when he realized he couldn’t take the bitterness and had to temper it with almost half milk and sugar. Sweet sugar like Texas desert dust whipped up by a storm permeated the air and blew upwards where he poured and he could taste it on his tongue. He would have refilled the sugar dish again—a habit like most instilled in him by a lifetime of passive aggressive lecture notes from his mother—but the entire process was so convoluted and labor intensive, so antiquated from a time when the woman was younger than he, that it made his already light head spin.

In the pantry, there was a blue glass container almost shaped like a lantern where they stored their sugar with silver scoop resting half buried inside. This too was nearly empty. So Phillip would often have to take it down (heavy glass that was nearly three decades older than him passed down from his mother’s mother and with no actual handles so he had to grip it and trust that his flesh did the trick) and slowly, so as not to drop it, walk it to the counter and set it next to the small silver sugar dish. Then he would go back to the pantry and grab one of the ten pound bags of sugar that sat on the same shelf as the neglected baking ingredients; all purpose flour, cake flour, bread flour, baking soda, baking powder, brown sugar, white sugar, confectioner’s sugar, whipped icing mix, etc. He would have to take this, too, to the counter and set it next to the blue sugar holder so that each container was in descending order of size. Ripping open the bag of sugar, he would first pour this into the blue container until it was full and seal it. Then, fishing out the silver scoop, he would finally fill the little sugar dish again to the top.

Then he would usually proceed to dump the whole thing into his mug so that the coffee would rise all the way to the rim.

But even the thought was long and arduous and fatiguing and repetitive and he had come to loathe these sort of monotonous, useless processes as of late. These rituals like polite conversation done for virtually no reason except to keep face with all of the other humans. And so the sugar dish would stay empty and his mother would be upset, indeed, but the boy found he could hardly care. Which was a bit of a blasphemous thought, this disrespecting of elders and parentage—almost thrilling, the notion that he might actually be confronted by the woman.

He sipped the thin, runny, brown liquid and winced at the taste—still bitter. Then shivered. His mother had absentmindedly left all of the windows open, as she was apt to do lately, and Phillip pulled the thick letterman jacket he had taken up wearing tighter around his frame. The garment was deep red and purple, his school’s colors, and had been a gift from his class (though he was not really supposed to receive one until much later in his sophomore year) when it was clear he would not be returning. He recalled the look on the pretty, blonde girl’s face—his classmate, Allisson—when she had brought it up to his room that afternoon not long ago per his sister’s suggestion. The quick flash, the brief look of surprise, disgust, astonishment twisting her features into something quite ugly, golden ringlets of corn silk twisting and framing such a face —as if she were nauseated or repulsed by what he was becoming. But worse than even all that was the piteous look of understanding her features had slipped into as she had slipped the jacket onto his chest and slipped her hand into his and slipped down into a kneeling position alongside his bed where they slipped into easy but timid conversation before he slipped into an easy but timid sleep. He had never wanted to hit a woman as badly as he had wanted to smack that pretty ingénue’s face that day.

And when he woke up she had gone and he instantly wanted her back out of, if nothing else, pure loneliness and a shame and anger and fear that were incubating like that very same contagion inside of a hot, moist, dark-as-the-night can be part within him.

The jacket itself was soft and had his last name scrawled along the back in a blessed-looking sort of text, as was standard, and also the name of the school and their key bible verses, but no patches or designations acknowledging his achievements. He didn’t mind really. There was hardly anything worth acknowledging.

It was dark as the night can be outside and he was sore and weary from his visit to the clinic earlier that day. Every Wednesday for as long as the young man could remember, he had woken up very early, before school, and gone in for an examination and, if needed, a blood transfusion. His condition had first become apparent to his parents when the bumps and bruises he received in early childhood from learning to walk and play did not fade with time but instead blossomed into larger, billowing plumes of black and purple. Even with the continuous advancements in medical science characterizing the 20th century, it was a terrifying process and did little to stretch out the lifespan of the victim and, in his case, was prime suspect in investigating where the toxin, the curse that was slowly transforming his body and mind had entered. How funny, he found in a macabre sort of way, that his pale, perversely morbid self now was riddled with the black markings of blood pooling just under the flesh to serve as a reminder that he was doomed from birth, from even before the start, fait accompli, to serve as a promise that it was all intentional.

But maybe what had been introduced and was now destroying everything was in fact a coup de grace when compared to the lifetime of suffering that stretched to the horizon and the void beyond for someone with his condition. Maybe it was, after all, a mercy kill from the God he had devoted his life to from before he even knew what that could mean, before it was his choice to make. People from as far back as millennia itself remembered had died in horrifying ways. Could those deaths, too, have been a justifiable euthanization so that they did not have to face down the end from ripe old age and realize that their lives were meaningless and wasted? No accomplishments worth acknowledging?

But in his instance, he was very sure, this was not the case because he was wanted, had been quite thoroughly planned out, and it was all a part of God’s doing.

Beau Vine the Cat (all white with black spots) and Julietta the Cat (cloaked in black), both fat, old girls from the same litter, meowed with twin, complaining voices and began gnawing on the green arms of the withered Iris plant his mother had brought in from the frost. It was a very late bloomer, as the piercing cold was there to stay, and it had not yet opened, but promised to be very beautiful, so she said.

“Don’t—stop eating that!” Phillip shooed them away and then sighed when the animals returned to beg at his feet. He got them each their own special food from the pantry (every feline they owned, it seemed, had a distinct brand they preferred or special diet to keep to) and spooned it sloppily into bowls on the ground, breathing hard and gritting his teeth with the effort. When he turned around again, Scrappy the Cat was on the ground sniffing at the plant but keeping a close watch on the human in case he needed to protest his innocence.

“I don’t believe you.” Phillip said, irritated, and opened the back door to let all of the cats who weren’t already outside into the black cold. All except for Toby the idiot savant, of course, who was never to go outside. He didn’t really know what the term meant exactly, but his mother had taken to calling the animal that when he was still only a kitten as he was, despite his crossed eyes and diminished mental capacity, absolutely exceptional at catching flies. He could bat three of them out of the air and have them in his mouth before Phillip even realized there _was_ a fly buzzing about.

It was dark as the night can be outside and the boy hated it, but hated it in the way that men hate the unchanging things like traffic and taxes. He could dislike it all that he was able and with every molecule of his being that vibrated and hummed deep inside the tissues of his body, but with the changes come into his life—the zombie-like insomnia, then the days on end bedridden and sleeping nonstop, and the nighttime dwelling creatures that haunted his waking and dreaming nightmares throughout—he had very much become a nighttime dwelling creature himself and that was something that simply would not change.

It was dark as the night can be outside and inside alike and there was no comfort for him in the world. Only temporary reprieves like armistices to wars where he could play at being a sibling or baking a cake. When again he checked the temperature on the oven, it was ready and he put his batter in and set the timer.

His stomach had felt quite restless all day—liquefying and sloshing around like putrid fruit in the last stages of decomposing—so in order to anchor the organ to his body and not let it drift, he decided to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Warm and rich, it had been his favorite on cold, autumn evenings and so the boy buttered the bread and cut the tomatoes and grated the cheese, all with hands that shook from strain and chill alike, and pressed all of the ingredients together in a pan on the stove into something that smelled wonderful and was indeed very warm. But when he sat at the table in the adorable little breakfast nook with his snack on a plate and some milk in his glass, Phillip found that even when he brought the food up to his lips, his mouth simply would not open. Maybe it was lack of energy or lack of confidence. Or maybe he was just going through the motions.

He put the sandwich down.

It was entirely silent in the two-story house. Wednesday evenings his mother always went to church and stayed very late into the night or even morning hours, finding work to do with the various committees she was a part of. Daryl was a Vigo County police officer and already lived strange hours, but would often stay with his sons in Indianapolis every few weeks or so (they were all at a nondenominational Christian boarding school there) and Phillip’s sister and how she spent her days were as much of a mystery to him as quantum physics or atheists. So, in essence, as it was when he came into this world, he was often solely, entirely, deafeningly alone. Which, even with every other hand of fate he’d been dealt, was the cruelest thing of all.

Phillip had been an only child for most of his life and had few close friends who mostly did not now keep in touch. True, he had a sister and had known _of_ her all of his life, but this means nothing to a child growing up. From Indiana to Texas was a sixteen hour drive and that might as well have been a journey to space and back. Even when he had met her those few times and they had played silly kid games like tag (only when he was at his grandparents because his mother would never let him run or climb), it was like neighborhood acquaintances or summer camp friends one does not expect to see again.

But all of that had changed some six or five-and-a-half years ago when she became his sister, truly, with the same level of blasé nonchalance as his father disappeared or his uncle died and then again as Daryl moved in. All without his permission or consultation. Fait accompli, as Avery would say in one of the many moments when he would use French or Italian or even Japanese to illustrate a point much more beautifully spoken with the phrase of another language. “Or; it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, as I would always say to my parents.” The young British man added once with a wink.

Phillip drank his milk slowly, so as not to irritate his headache and listened to the wind howl outside through the screen of the open window by the table. Funny, though, that the wind chimes weren’t making a racket as they did even in a gentle breeze. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, feeling a rare moment of peace in the chaos of the storm, tasting the cold air deep in the back of his mouth and down in the pits of his lungs.

Time oozed like bloody, amber colored sap down the rough, tepid flesh of the tree, encasing him like the fly on the wall that he was becoming—becoming like that horror movie he had seen a few years ago, that he had always been—

A little shuffling and scratching noise on the wall made him open his eyes again. The baking timer had stopped at 0 and there was a bit of an unpleasant odor filling the room—a burning almost, though when he got up and retrieved the cake from the oven, all _appeared_ well. He set it on top to cool and chided himself for falling asleep when there was so important a thing to be done and some movement to the right caught his eye as the large, ornately framed mirror on the wall opposite was swaying in the breeze—

He gasped and whipped his head around when he saw the pale face and horns staring at him through the window screen reflected in the surface of the mirror.

But, of course, as in every horror story based in real life or fantasy, there was nothing there. Nothing but black night reaching in from between the inches thick opening of the window to the sill.

Phillip stared for several minutes straight, heart pounding so thunderstruck that he could feel it pulse in his tongue, in his ears and in his temples and the flesh of his head so hard that his skull ached. The shakes had stopped and his eyes bulged but he only stood and stared for an impossibly long amount of time at the row of windows behind him. Nothing moved, the night was still. Still. Violently, relentlessly still like the calm before the storm.

But the young man had seen what he had seen and no one, though he knew they would try, could convince him otherwise, like his sister and the black stag. Like Dr. Artz and her awkward evasion when he spoke of how his uncle came to him sometimes for reasons he could not say. They would deny because they did not want to deal with the consequences, as Father Abaddon had told him many times when discussing the sort-of science of the sinner, but Phillip would embrace because, as afraid as he was, he knew this was a message for him.

God worked in mysterious ways and everything, every miniscule motion both unconsciously automatic or consciously forced, everything that he thought he did of his own volition was a part of the plan and known long before. Eyes were always watching. Invisible eyes were watching him now like the oculus at the top of the dome peering downward and out in the night as dark as it can be and in the forest and in the shadows of his own home so foreign now as if it were a stranger’s. They could see right through him and so nothing was truly secret and it should have been comforting that every decision had already been taken out of his hands before he was born but instead he was truly stricken. Eyes, eyes crawling over his flesh like pin pricks and ants and burrowing inside and making nests—

Phillip spun around once more to face the hallway and could see even through the blackness that there was no longer anything there, though he had felt it advancing slowly like the nighttime creatures onto his malformed back bent with exhaustion and paranoia. Spirits watching him with the sleepy, apathetic eyes of beings waiting for the end of eternity. Demons energized with malice and only moments to live independent of the hellfire from whence they were born who wanted nothing more than to wet their claws with gore.

The cats meowing and scratching at the backdoor tore the boy away from his thoughts. He let them in, (One, two, three, four, five—wait, how many had gone out? How many cats did they have now?) then locked it and went around closing and locking every window that framed the picturesque breakfast nook and over the counters. When he got to the last one, the one he knew he had seen a twisted, sinister face peering in at him from—a visible monster watching him whereas all the others did not make themselves known—he stared a long time into the deep, broad line of trees that marked where their property dissolved away into forest. An animal that he could not identify made a strange, wailing sound somewhere faint and far off in nature and as he watched, the shadows shifted and moved to form gnarled shapes moving amongst the grass of the yard.


End file.
